But all Mel wanted to do was study the lists in his black notebook and make his plans. He bought chart paper, one inch equals a foot, and he drew it over and over until he got it the way he wanted—a flower garden with a neat edge, straight rows, a smooth path, and a little place to sit. When he got it right, he colored it in with crayons, gray-blue for the border of lamb’s ears. “Bob,” he said to himself. “Bob.”

Then the real work started. It was hot and there was a lot of walking and hauling—blue bottles from the recycle center, bags of rabbit manure, the trays of little plants, and worst of all the bag of Sakrete. The ground was as hard as a rock—nothing ever got dug there but graves. Mel had to wait until a soaking rain before he could get a spade in it to dig out the centipede grass. He cut his finger breaking up the bottles, he stuck himself on the prickles of the rosebush, and one day he got into a wasp nest. There were unforeseen difficulties: He mixed the Sakrete too watery in his first batch, before he learned better, and the blue apostrophe in I’m sank out of sight. He had to shift the path over a foot from his plan; an old Stringer great-grandfather’s grave marker would have stuck up between lonesome and without. And he had to plant a taller variety of marigolds to hide his mother’s marker. It stuck up too high and looked too shiny. But finally he took an aluminum lawn chair out there and set it up on a little circle he had paved for it at the head of the path between the Louis Philippe rosebushes. He sat down with his elbows on his knees. It felt just right.

“Your best gardening is always in the future,” Nancy had said, and finally, in early fall, it seemed as if the future was here. Even the weeds in the roadside ditches looked like a garden—foamy goldenrod and blue ageratum, nodding heads of summer-farewell and yellow spires of crotalaria, all twined around with the twinkling red of cardinal vine—everything putting on a last show before the frost.

“At eight weeks of age the rabbits should weigh between four and five pounds and are ready to harvest,” Mel’s grandmother read in Raising Rabbits for Fun and Profit. “Now this won’t be bad at all,” she said to Mel. “They won’t suffer.”

But it was a Saturday morning, and while his grandmother was rummaging around in the kitchen drawer looking for gallon-size freezer bags, Mel sneaked off to the Citgo.

“Well, look at you!” said Nancy. “I bet you’ve grown four inches!”

“Where’s your black book?” asked the nurse.

“I want to show you something,” said Mel.

“Well, sure,” said Nancy.

“Right now?” said the nurse.