"I'll just run up and get some shoes on," she says to Eric.

"I wouldn't push like this, but I've got to get these tomato plant roots wet today, and the sun is just-never mind."

Like talking to a statue, she thinks.

And dashes off to get something for her feet.

Eric watches her go, grinning balefully.

"… so you see, Randy, if I put in the herbs here, in these five rows, basil-two rows of basil, because I figure once the tomatoes get ripe, you'll want to-"

"I'm sure it's all exactly right," he says, not so much as glancing at the chart of the garden she has prepared, the only way to know what's where, since, with the exception of the tomatoes, nothing else is visible in the garden.

"You're doing one helluva job."

She looks into his expressionless face, somewhat taken aback.

That's something you say to the hired help.

Is that what she is, then?

Even after what they did-hired help?

Or is she reading him all wrong?

Maybe it's because he cares for her a lot and the garden, compared to her, is way off the scale of importance, lost down below.

So that whatever she does or does not do is of far less significance than her being here, than her being herself.

She cannot tell.

He's a very important person in his own right, she has quickly learned.

A big man, perhaps even a great one, is Randy Buck.

He sits there patiently, in his robe, in his den (Doesn't the man ever wear any clothes at home? she wonders), waiting for her to either continue or leave, inviting neither action.

Studying her like a bug under a microscope, or so it seems to her.

Strange man, really.

A combination of heat, in the form of sexual passion for her, and coolness, one might even say coldness, distant from her, more distant than she would have thought possible in the case of two who have done what they did.