My wife and I lived on an Annapolis promontory and, yes, the view was stunning. But what mattered most to Amelia was her plants. Each spring, the daffodils bloomed first, all yellow and white bells, then the azaleas and dogwoods popped in their pinks and reds. But this year, a strong storm came off the Chesapeake Bay and rendered it all an ugly mess, as if Jackson Pollock had poked his paws around in the matter. Amelia was so forlorn. I don’t know why serious gardeners bother so much. Even if the weather remains tame, flowers just don’t last long enough to be worth the trouble. Amelia says that gardening is better than having a therapist. Even so, I wish she’d see one. Or maybe I’m the guy in need of a shrink. There’s certainly legions of women who think I do. I wrote a novel, after a string of fairly forgettable mysteries, called The Gardens of Barren Women. It became notoriously popular, and Amelia and Michael Newmar, a decidedly nerdy couple of moderate means, found themselves living a very comfortable lifestyle. I need to remind myself regularly that many women love the book. I get nice letters all the time. But somehow it’s the haters that have dominated my thoughts on its reception. It’s safe to say that few novels have divided women more. My wife, a tenured tutor at St. John’s, was among the haters. She was enraged by the book, and it took a lot of heated talks to convince her that the characters I created weren’t all based on her. Over time, Amelia chilled on the subject. I’m sure the new house with a huge, ready to be planted yard that we were able to afford had something to do with that.

“Come see the babies!” said Amelia. She held trays of tomato saplings, forty-eight tiny compartments in total. Their cultivation and harvesting will allow her to participate in late August’s Great National Tomato Glut. All the gardeners in the country will be begging, pleading, imploring their friends and neighbors to take a bag or two of tomatoes before they all go bad. Plants are indeed Amelia’s babies. We weren’t able to have children and that was seemingly fine to us. In our twenties we thought it was great because it simplified trying to have sinless, worry-free Catholic sex. It wasn’t until Amelia turned thirty-nine and panicked that things got fraught. There was no way I wanted a child at that point, not by any medical magic, nor by adoption. She almost left me. We have scars from those battles. I’m the bad guy – that status is my penalty for winning the war. I just live with it. Once in a great while, things spill out all over again, like one of those oozing, bubbling fissures in the earth’s surface.

“Michael, come take a look at the babies. They won’t be this small for long.” I set my book and martini down to go over and humor her.

“They’re cute, Amelia. Really.”

“You don’t think that. You couldn’t care less.”

“I appreciate a good BLT. I could do without all those rotting bags of heirlooms in September and October.”

“Hmph. Speaking of, what kind of rot are you reading?”

“Just some lightweight romp I’m reviewing for Atlantic.”

“You’re so lacking in the classics. Did you ever begin to read Ovid?”

“Please, not Ovid again.”

“It would help you to appreciate Shakespeare more.”

“The only thing I like about Shakespeare is the actresses. Those accents! Judi Dench and Helen Mirren. Oh, and Helena Bonham Carter. That’s one bewitching Brit, without a doubt.”

“Really, Michael, you’re too old to be such a sophomoric little twit. Not with a bestseller that got a few decent notices.”

“More than a few. Have a care, that book quadrupled your garden space.”

“I’ve paid for it in my own way, many times over. Is she really that pretty?”

“Who?”

“Helena Bonham Carter.”

“Kenneth Branagh thought so. Now she’s with Tim Burton, the lucky bloke.”

“When that dime-store novel of yours caught fire, you could’ve had a fetching young woman. Why didn’t you?”

“After all these years, you ask me that?”

“Yeah. How come? We didn’t have kids and we weren’t crazy for each other. It wouldn’t have been a sticky mess if we had split.”

“Well, it would be nice, I suppose, if I said it was because I loved you in my own oblique way, and valued the years we’d been together.”

“But that wasn’t it, was it?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“It’s hard for me to put my finger on it. The best I can say is, I just didn’t want to be trite.”

“Trite?”

“Yes, to have run off with some pulchritudinous young literary intern would’ve been so trite, so typical. Amelia, you will snicker at me, but I felt like a certain responsibility came along with the success of that book. It gave me a sense of pride…”

“Don’t I know that,” she interrupted. I had to laugh.

“You’re right, my head got big. But I still felt like some decorum was required of my authorial standing.”

“I hate that book. You think I’ve mellowed about it, but I haven’t. And there are times when I almost hate you. It takes a lot to keep all that down inside me.”

“Why’s it coming up now?”

“Who in Hades knows why? It just surfaces once in a while, that’s all. Maybe it’s because all my beautiful spring blooms got ruined in that squall.”

“Look, let me help you plant the saplings.”

“Oh, would you?” She tried to mute that she was pleased to hear this, but I clearly picked up that I had said the perfect thing.

“Yes, let’s get the babies to bed.”

“Michael?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Have you ever, when you were alone, just had a good cry over everything we’ve been through?”

“Well, yes. On a couple of occasions, I have.”

“Good.”