So she scaled back her ambitions and now as a veteran gardener she planted 80 percent things that would survive a nuclear holocaust—lots of bulbs, impatiens, milkweed, honeysuckle, caladiums, and lily grass. The other 20 percent were experiments—rock rose, basil and mint, and pink azaleas. The azaleas fell to gall and canker, but the garden held up well until frost, and everything grew like weeds, because frankly, that’s what grew best.

In her attempts to earn her green thumb, Anne became a devoted listener to Neil Sperry’s Texas Gardening radio show. Mr. Sperry was a becalming presence on Saturday mornings in the Malone house. He had a voice like a soaker hose and took calls on KRLD for a couple of hours, gently assuring folks of the importance of the right fertilizers—boy, did he like fertilizer—and mulching the thin topsoils of white-rock Dallas. One time she even called in, and Dan listened on delay in the other room as Anne in North Dallas asked whether she should replant the little alien plantlets that were going apeshit on her hanging spider plant. It was really a BS question; she just felt a menopausal need to call Neil Sperry and tell him how much she liked his show.

Across the alley, the willow in the Schraeders’ backyard shrugged like the coat of a mastodon. Out of it came a mourning cloak butterfly as big as Anne’s hand, drifting across the yard, alighting on the forsythia, and then fluttering over to the shade and settling on the gas meter. Anne wrinkled her itching nose—she was allergic to all these plants but year after year pushed through—and scoured her face with the back of her gardening glove. She stepped toward the house and studied the butterfly, its brown wings fringed with pale corn-silk edges. Of all the things that go into something so delicate . . . As she drew nearer, the iridescent dots of blue glimmered as if they had been painted by hand. It was ridiculously Mesozoic in size as it laid out its wings flat against the silver pipe. It too looked annoyed in its attempts to overwinter, like its nymph driven mad by the gods. Anne studied its dark chocolate wings and could make out the thick fur on its thorax.

And in that moment, she thought of Ronan Carroll—their dinners downtown after lectures, their walks in Westchester where he held her close. Anne had all these things to say to him, to her husband. But then nothing. The early-afternoon sky was now a clear blue, the apricot trees in the backyard shimmering in the sun, the world bright and awake, indifferent to her disappointment. She stepped too close and up the butterfly went, floating on the breeze again and carried back to the willow tree.