To start, Luke had me weed the flowerbeds. “Gardening for beginners,” he said. “Just tug and toss.” Something else I knew how to do. Luke worked beside me for the whole two-hour period, saying little, occasionally gesturing at a gnarled section I had missed. I stole glances at him whenever it felt safe, but he concentrated on his tasks so fully I felt he wouldn’t have noticed me even if I’d taken off my clothes. (Not that I was thinking about that sort of thing, of course. No, I was not.) His cheekbones were high and sharp, which gave him the look of an ancient Greek dignitary, and his skin was brown and smooth under all that hair. I fixated on the soft baby skin in the crook of his elbow: I wanted to pinch it. He had freckles too, which was really unfair of him. He never furrowed his brow, even in the sun, and when he reached his hands into the ground, he closed his eyes completely.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, I realize that now—far younger than I am as I write this, an age I now find embarrassing in other people, particularly men. But back then, he seemed timeless, ageless, fixed as a character in a film. As if no matter when I had arrived, that summer or twenty years from that summer, he would have been there, waiting for me, looking just the same. Nothing like my father; exactly like him.

Just when my back was beginning to hurt, Luke stood and squinted at the sun. “Rota’s over,” he said.

I took off the gardening gloves he’d given me and set them carefully on a bench. He bent and picked a purple flower from one of the beds I had cleared. He looked at it for a moment, twirled it between his fingers, and held it out to me, and all at once I felt exposed. For the first time that day, I had the sense of myself as a girl alone with a man. I took the flower, making sure not to touch his fingers with mine.

“Ah,” he said. “Your hands are like the Buddha’s.”

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what he meant. Later, I would blush over the compliment—my fingers are short and stubby, not at all like the Buddha’s graceful tapers. I put the flower behind my ear.

He nodded and disappeared into the garden shed. I let myself out.