But Levy acted as if no one had ever grown anything from a seed before. He got down on his knees in the dirt and clucked over the shoots, and when he asked which was which Rachel realized that she’d doubted the whole process so thoroughly she hadn’t bothered to label the rows.

She wouldn’t set a wedding date and, except for gardening, she drifted. She took Leah to Golda’s or Willa’s pool and she lay on her back out in the water listening to Leah laugh. Willa’s sons, Tom Jr. and Eric, came home in June and they drifted, too. The white children didn’t shun them, but they didn’t seek them out, and Rachel sensed in both of them, especially in Tom Jr., a pride that kept them from making the first move. So they lay by the pool, too. They swam, barbecued, read, played some gin. Tom Jr. wore a big Afro, thin at the ends, so his hair seemed to float around his head. Leah stood on her toes to reach for his hair and when he’d pick her up and let her touch it, she’d bury her small fat hands in it and get a look of perfect peace on her face. He let her crawl all over him. She pulled his hair, bent back his toes and fingers, punched him, and loved sleeping on top of him. When he lay on the grass on his stomach, she sprawled across the small of his back. When he lay on his back, she curled up on his chest like a cat.

In August Rachel and Willa took some extra vegetables to Reverend Ryder. At first Rachel felt shy about going inside. All her friends were Jews or atheists or had gotten married in a garden or on the side of a hill and she’d never been in a church before. She’d seen pictures of churches with beaked and taloned gargoyles clinging to fluted columns that rose into the stone ceilings, and when she went inside the plain frame Congregational church she thought she’d see the Virgin, draped in chiseled stone, melting eyes raised to heaven in torment, and a stone or stained-­glass Jesus crucified, with blood running into his eyes from the thorns gouging his forehead and into his groin from the wound in his side. She expected Roman grand guignol with griffins and demons, writhing serpents, and saints in agony trapped against the walls, embedded in stone, staring out of perpetual gloom.