Wolf Peach

I’m planting tomatoes in a new spring, fresh out of sequestration. I’m mixing compost into soil, hopeful this time, after the ruin of last year when, during our mass shut-in, my attempt to cultivate life in a garden bed did not go as planned. I’d been sending my children off on alternating weekends with their father, his attendance in our house an assignment I failed. In solitude, in opprobrium, I planted the seeds: tomatoes, asters, twining melons. I needed life, or signs of life, some exchange of chemicals with other living elements that might respond or succeed.

But something went very wrong with the tomatoes. Where green pods should have emerged from flowery sockets, where they should have darkened to red like tiny flushed faces, there was only a forest of leaves. The cantaloupes grew and were eaten, the cucumbers amassed all summer on their vines, but on the tomato plants, on the Sungolds and Five Star Grapes “sixty-two days indeterminate”—an easy number of days to wait for a tomato, I had thought, when we were all waiting for life itself indefinitely—nothing would come.

My sister was my witness. She came on a Friday when my children had gone, her three-year-old on one hip, a pen-stained canvas tote on the other, the sort we both carry everywhere—stamped with a bookstore logo, jammed with