A short time later she saw Mrs. Krol approaching the front stairs and a few seconds after that she snatched up the avocado plant and hurried to overtake her in the front hall.

“Here,” she said.

Bertha Krol looked at her.

“Take care of it. Maybe it will grow for you. Put it in the sunlight. Understand?”

Bertha Krol gave no sign that she did or did not. She merely stared until Gaby turned away and went back to her own apartment.

She sat on the sofa and wondered why she had given the plant away.

Eventually she understood that although she had believed a moment ago that she was pushing time away toward morning, when Adam would come home, she had known she would not be there when he arrived.

She packed only her clothes. She left everything else. When the suitcase was closed she sat down and wrote a note, hastily, for fear she would not be able to force herself to write it at all if she took her time. She placed it on the couch, weighted down with the vase of paper flowers so he would be certain not to miss it.

She was unaware of driving out of the city. When she looked around she was on Rte. 128 but heading the wrong way, north, toward New Hampshire. A reaching-out toward her father? No, thank you, she thought. She got to the other side of the split highway in Stoneham and drove south again, her foot jammed down on the fuel pedal. Neither the tough cop who once had given her a ticket on this road nor any of his colleagues materialized to humble her as she made the Plymouth a projectile, wondering idly about the great concrete abutments of the overpasses through which the car flashed.

One saw them pictured in the newspapers and on television, immovable objects with what was left of the vehicles and people they claimed periodically. But she knew she had a charmed life, destined to trickle away, not end in a flash of light or a clap of thunder; her hand would not obey her if she decided to turn the wheel slightly as she approached an overpass.

It was later, weaving at breakneck speed in and out of the swift traffic that pushed down Rte. 24, that she realized how stupid it had been to have given the plant to Mrs. Krol. Almost certainly Bertha Krol would get drunk and scream her screams and throw the plant out of the window. The black store-bought dirt would be scattered over Phillips Street with Bertha’s garbage and the plant would never grow to be an avocado tree.

He knocked when he found the door locked and then grunted in surprise as he saw that the morning paper had not been taken in. The apartment was murky but he spotted the note at once under its floral marker.

Adam,