Her first thought was that he was dead, but then she heard the snoring. She stood over him and smelled a familiar sour odor. She reached under the cushion and pulled the empty fifth of vodka out from under his arm. She held the bottle by the neck and pictured breaking it over his head, the shards exploding over the pillows, his scalp blooming with blood. It would ruin the couch, Anne thought.

“Pat!”

No response.

“Pat!”

Out cold. She dropped the bottle on the floor in disgust and then shut the door to the TV room, sealing him off like the airlock on a submarine.

Anne changed out of her nice Juror Number Six clothes and put on Dan’s outgrown St. Rita’s sweats. It was lunchtime but she wasn’t hungry, so she made tea and scratched margarine across an English muffin. Even with the door to the back room closed she could hear Pat’s snoring, and she stared at the carriage driver on the Thomas’ bag with his black whip and she felt her anger galloping along. He’s sick, and I can’t even bring myself to pray for him. She had to get out of that house.

Anne went out the front door and into the open maw of the garage to retrieve her gardening gloves and pail of tools. She dragged them around to the backyard and the small plot between the apricot trees and the forsythia where she kept her garden.

Since moving from the Bronx, the garden was her oft-foiled effort at being a Texan. This was her sixth attempt. She had started with the now-embarrassing rookie notion she could grow anything she wanted in the subtropical climate. First time around was something out of Exodus—the tomatoes became a Disney park for aphids, the cucumbers suffocated by leaf spot, and the rosebush caught witch’s broom and blistered in the heat. The next season, she became obsessed with Texas perennials. This required a class at the arboretum and dozens of trips to Wolfe Nurseries. Pat started calling his wife Lady Bird when for two glorious weeks after the spring rain, the garden looked like a pasture blooming off I-35. The backyard exploded with an impressionist palette of bluebonnets, spire sage, snapdragons, pokeweed, four-nerve daisies, skullcaps, and purple obedient plant. But by Mother’s Day it was already past peak, the heat kicked in, and the flowers broiled and browned by summer. Then Anne went in a minimal direction with a desert garden. She scraped off a half foot of topsoil and bought two hundred pounds of pea gravel, planted a sword yucca, a couple bearded cacti, and pipe vine. It was hard to tell what was soaking in through the pebbles and she overwatered, rotting this Sonoran tableau at its roots.