The Corrections

smells of mulch and dirt, and the onshore autumn breeze, were full of childhood memory.
    Robin was shoveling rubble into a makeshift sieve. She had thin arms and a hummingbird metabolism and took many fast small bites of rubble instead of fewer big ones. She was wearing a black bandanna and a very dirty T-shirt with the text QUALITY DAYCARE: PAY NOW OR PAY LATER . She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see Denise.
    “This is a big project,” Denise said.
    Robin shrugged, holding the shovel with both hands as if to stress that she felt interrupted.
    “Do you want some help?” Denise said.
    “No. The kids were supposed to do this, but there’s a game over at the river. I’m just cleaning up.”
    She whacked the rubble in the sieve to urge some dirt through. Caught in the mesh were fragments of brick andmortar, gobs of roofing tar, ailanthus limbs, petrified cat shit, Baccardi and Yuengling labels with backings of broken glass.
    “So what did you grow?” Denise said.
    Robin shrugged again. “Nothing that would impress you.” “Well, like what?”
    “Like zucchini and pumpkins.”
    “I cook with both of those.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Who’s the girl?”
    “I have a couple of half-time assistants that I pay. Sara’s a junior at Temple.”
    “And who are the kids who were supposed to be here?”
    “Neighborhood kids between twelve and sixteen.” Robin took off her glasses and rubbed sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve. Denise had forgotten, or had never noticed to begin with, what a pretty mouth she had. “They get minimum wage plus vegetables, plus a share of any money we make.”
    “Do you subtract expenses?”
    “That would discourage them.”
    “Right.”
    Robin looked away, across the street, at a row of dead buildings with rusting sheet-metal cornices. “Brian says you’re very competitive.”
    “Oh really?”
    “He said he wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle you.”
    Denise winced.
    “He said he wouldn’t want to be the other chef in the kitchen with you.”
    “No danger of that,” Denise said.
    “He said he wouldn’t want to play Scrabble with you.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “He said he wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”
    OK, OK, Denise thought.
    Robin was breathing hard. “Anyway.”
    “Yeah, anyway.”
    “Here’s why I didn’t go to Paris,” Robin said. “I thought Erin was too young. Sinéad was having fun at art camp, and I had tons of work here.”
    “I understood that.”
    “And you guys were going to be talking about food all day. And Brian said it was business. So.”
    Denise raised her eyes from the dirt but couldn’t quite look Robin in the eye. “It was business.”
    Robin, her lip trembling, said, “Whatever!”
    Above the ghetto a fleet of copper-bottomed clouds, Revere Ware clouds, had withdrawn to the northwest. It was the moment when the blue backdrop of the sky grayed to the same value as the stratus formations in front of it, when night light and day light were in equilibrium.
    “You know, I’m not really into guys,” Denise said.
    “Pardon me?”
    “I said I don’t sleep with men anymore. Since I got divorced.”
    Robin frowned as if this made no sense to her at all. “Does Brian know that?”
    “I don’t know. Not from my telling him.”
    Robin thought this over for a moment and then began to laugh. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She said, “Ha ha ha!” Her laugh was full-throated and embarrassing and, at the same time, Denise thought, lovely. It echoed off the rusty-corniced houses. “Poor Brian!” she said. “Poor Brian!”
    Robin immediately became more cordial. She put down her shovel and gave Denise a tour of the garden—“my little enchanted kingdom” she called it. Finding that she had Denise’s interest, she risked enthusiasm. Here was a new asparagus patch, here two rows of young pear and apple trees that she hoped to espalier, here the late crops of sunflowers, acorn squash, and kale. She’d planted only sure winners thissummer, hoping to hook a core group of local teenagers and reward them for the thankless infrastructural work of preparing beds, running pipes, adjusting drainages, and connecting rain barrels to the roof of the house.
    “This is basically a selfish project,” Robin said. “I always wanted a big garden, and now the whole inner city’s going back to farmland. But the kids who really need to be out working with their hands and learning what fresh food tastes like are the ones who aren’t