I wasn’t sure what he expected me to do about it. His sock must have been blue once, was now soaking a deep purplish color, and had the miniaturized embroidery of some very expensive hiking line.

“Are you going to do something?” he snapped. His was a loud voice, where I was not used to loud voices, or, rather, was used to mine being the loudest.

I considered the smear of mud and blood. “I could bring you out some bandages. Or”—I knew that I was supposed to offer; I did not want to—“you could come inside.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “Thanks. That one. Can you help me?”

I went and opened the gate for him. He pushed through, and then steadied himself with a sudden hand on my shoulder. His palm was slick, not just with sweat, but with dust and sap and his own blood. My tank top strap, thin and rough under the ball of his wrist, ground into my skin. He was perhaps eight inches taller than me; I am not tall. I would guess forty, fifty pounds heavier. His arm came down across my shoulders, against the soft back of my neck, and I ducked out from beneath him before he could get a grip on me.

He fell. He landed with his shoulder in one of Agnes’s planters, which I had built. The wood groaned under him, and he groaned, his eyes closed. I stepped back from him, resting my heels in the soft dirt. “Please don’t touch me.”

He opened his eyes. They were blue, that human blue which is not like the water or the sky or flower petals, only an eye. His mouth was slack and his face pallid, and I noticed then, in an absent way, that he was handsome. Beneath the beard and dirt, he had an easy, masculine kind of handsomeness, like a face carved from oak. Sweat stood out on his forehead in individual droplets, as if startled from his pores. I pointed at the door. “It’s just there.” He had made it this far.

When he at last got to the couch, he collapsed without waiting for me to offer it, so I went into the kitchen and got the old dishrag. “Put this under your foot,” I told him. The couch was not new, but we’d kept it in good condition. “And take off your shoes.”

“I’m Arthur,” he called after me, even as I went out of the room.