The Second Morning — Summary

The notebook has eleven pages in her mother’s handwriting and seven in her own. The first eleven are small and level, written in a pen that pressed hard enough to show through. The next seven are Alma Reyes at twenty-three, sloping, her a’s not closed, about the same thing her mother’s pages are about.

Page nineteen is where the cuttings start.

She is thirty-four now. On the bus she opens the notebook on her knee and turns past all eighteen pages without reading any of them. She has done this several thousand times. The gesture is not respectful and it is not avoidant. It is the gesture of a person getting to page nineteen.

The bus is every thirty-five minutes and she knows its arrival to the second, and knowing has not made it come more often. At the nursery the irrigation runs itself and has for as long as anyone there can remember, and Alma walks the north block anyway, because the north block has a head that clogs and the system reports the zone and not the head. Six minutes. A landscape guy’s quote assembles itself against four yards inside two hundred miles while the two of them walk out to the block, and neither refers to it, and she tells him the multi-stems on the east end are better and the ones he is looking at are better looking.

At 10:40 her father’s annual re-determination opens, answers itself, and closes. It draws the wage record and the physician’s file, generates the certification, files it, receives the acknowledgment, and puts a line in a log, and the whole of it takes about four seconds. Alma is carrying a flat of ninebark liners forty feet from the bench to the truck bay. Her phone buzzes once. She sets the flat down, reads four words, and puts it away. What she thinks about, walking back, is number 204, which she is fairly sure she lost by cutting too far above the node, in a hurry, in the rain.

Behind the building there is a strip of packed dirt nine feet by forty with a hundred and six pots in it, numbered in grease pencil to 214. Nobody asked for the rows. Nothing is being sold off them. The system holds every date and every determination and the name of everyone who ever touched the file, and it does not hold anything about the rows, because nobody has ever asked it to.

The rows are not a hobby. They are a count of a town that nobody is keeping.

She writes the day in standing up, on the hood of her father’s car, because sitting down to write it would make it an evening thing.