She began once again to help her grandmother in the greenhouse. She wanted to prove to herself that in fact the jasmine had not miraculously grown long enough overnight to reach the ground. And she was right. The flowers were still suspended a good twenty feet above the floor of the greenhouse. And the seedling heads of the loves-lies-bleeding were sealed shut, with perhaps just a thread of the deep red color showing through.

“Oh, it will be another month or more until they open,” her grandmother said when she noticed Rose looking at them so closely.

Rose looked around. Her grandmother seemed quite alert, especially compared to nights when she would stare at her blankly. So often Rose felt as if she were a stranger in this household, or at best treated as some kind of gentle intruder. She didn’t really blame her grandmother. She knew she was teetering on the edge of some sort of dementia. Yet here in the greenhouse her grandmother was always alert. She seemed “grounded” in this soil, this old dirt that Rosalinda had called good dirt.

Rose continued to help. And each night after her grandmother went up to bed, Rose would set out some milk in a tin pan with some crumbled biscuits for the cat. She rarely saw the cat, but she had the sense of being observed by those tilting green eyes. She had decided September was a “her.” And occasionally she did hear her meowing. When she did, she always thought of the girl with the pointy red shoes. She loved those shoes!

And she loved September too. She wished the cat wasn’t so shy. September, she decided, was not an ungrateful cat. Just an eat-and-run cat. Cats were odd creatures. One had to give them time. Never rush a cat, Rose thought. Perhaps someday she might write a book about cats. Tips for Cat Owners. But that was the catch, of course. No one ever really owned a cat.

There were always new things to do in the greenhouse. New seeds to plant—some of which had to be soaked overnight to give them a good start—and trays to be fertilized. Plants that had grown too big needed to be transplanted into larger pots. It was Rose’s task to prepare the new pots with a mixture of peat and the granular stuff called vermiculite. She used Rosalinda’s formulas, all neatly written in a book.