It wasn’t much of a garden, really. The apartment buildings on her block surrounded a dingy courtyard that was divided by high fences into a dozen modest plots, one for each of the ground-floor apartments. Dorothy’s garden was a ten-foot-by-twenty-foot rectangle that lay outside the sliding glass door of her living room. Most of it was covered with patio brick, and the few square yards of soil were crowded with weeds. Nevertheless, this was where she’d decided to spend her final hours. It was 11:00 A.M. but the garden still lay in the shade. The surrounding apartment buildings blocked the sun for almost the whole day. From the chaise lounge Dorothy could see only a small patch of sky overhead, a square of hazy blue. She looked up and saw a couple of pigeons fly across the square. A few minutes later she spotted a distant airliner. She wore nothing but her bathrobe, an old white cotton thing. Any of her neighbors on the upper floors could see her on the chaise lounge if they happened to look out their back windows, but Dorothy was in too much pain to worry about that.
