“What’s this?” she said. “It might be a gravestone.” She ran her fingers along the eroded lines of spidery letters. “We could do one of those rubbings,” she said, squinting to read the words. “Something about a garden, God something, rose something. Here it says when something is cool, eve, ‘when the eve is cool.’”

But it was hot in the sun on that April day, and she sat down on the teak bench in the shade and thought up titles for articles she might write: “Chintz Transforms a Foyer,” “Lighten That Hedge with Old-Fashioned Elaeagnus!”

She lay back on the bench and closed her eyes. She could hear the clicks and whirrings of his camera like little birdsongs. Through her eyelids she could see shifting patterns of sun and shade.

“Imagine,” she said, “this garden being here, unchanged, all these years.”

“Yep,” he said, stuffing rolls of film into the pockets of his vest. “Well, that’s what we like about the South.”

“Still, let’s just sit here a minute, in the shade, in this peaceful place.”

Nothing with Strings

LOUISE AND HER sister, Lily, were standing in the middle of the parking lot of a Super Wal-Mart in Despera Springs, Florida, trying to decide where to sprinkle their mother’s ashes. They had driven for hours across the Panhandle to get here, with the ashes in a gold-toned plastic urn on the backseat, but now nothing seemed right. They kept remembering the stories their mother had told them all their lives of her Despera Springs childhood: the monkey who died in a watermelon rind; the mysterious stranger who walked around behind a blue mule and was never seen again; the brave boy who swam across the lake in the path of light from the tower of the Chautauqua building. In a lifetime of retellings, certain phrases had settled into place like keystones: “curled up in a watermelon rind,” “never seen again,” and “the path of light”—and the stories developed a lilt and cadence that made Despera Springs seem like a fairy-tale place, not an ordinary town you could find on a map and drive to on an interstate highway.

But here they were, and as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but discount stores, gas stations, used-car lots, and fast-food restaurants.

“We can’t sprinkle her ashes here,” said Louise. “She’d end up stuck on somebody’s shoes and tracked into a nail and tan salon.”

Lily was no help. She had just had her heart broken by a banjo player, and all she wanted to do was listen to the Stanley Brothers singing heartache songs and weep.

“Let’s go,” said Louise. “Just drive around, maybe we’ll find a vacant lot, sprinkle her in some weeds, and get on home.”