In Summertime Saga

"Sweetie, could you do me a favor?"

Debbie was in the kitchen doorway wiping her hands on a towel. She'd been cooking, chicken and something with onions, and the whole house smelled warm and brown. I was on the couch with my notebook open pretending to do Bissette's French homework and actually staring at the same conjugation table I'd been staring at for twenty minutes.

"Sure."

"My friend Diane, she lives next door. The farmhouse? She could use some help with her garden. I told her I'd send you over." Debbie's hands twisted the towel in a way that had nothing to do with drying them. "She's been alone since-" She stopped. Looked at the towel. "She could just use the company, is all."

"Yeah, no problem."

"She's very nice. You'll like her." Debbie smiled at me. The smile was getting less wrong. Still not right, but the distance was closing. "Just go through the side gate. The one past the garage."

I closed the notebook. The conjugation of désirer was going to have to wait. I put on shoes and went out the back door and through the yard and there was a wooden gate at the far end that I'd seen before and never opened. It led to a dirt path between two properties and the path was short, maybe fifty yards, and it ended at a low fence with a latch and past the fence was a garden.

The garden was bigger than I expected. Rows of something green that I couldn't identify because plants were one of the many categories of thing I'd never paid attention to in either of my lives. Tomatoes on stakes. A section that looked like it had been weeded recently and a section that looked like it was winning the fight against whoever had been weeding it. A wheelbarrow with a cracked handle was parked near a shed. The shed door was open and tools were hanging on hooks inside. Past the garden, a farmhouse, white with a porch that wrapped around the front. Past the farmhouse, fields that went back toward the tree line.

A woman was on her knees in the dirt between two rows of whatever the green things were. She had a wide-brim straw hat and gardening gloves and a sundress with thin straps and she was pulling weeds and dropping them into a bucket beside her. Her back was to me.

"Hi," I said. "Debbie sent me."

She turned around and stood up and took her hat off and I stopped.

The face looking at me was Debbie's face. The exact same face. Same cheekbones, same grey eyes, same mouth, same jawline. She was smiling at me with Debbie's smile and her body was Debbie's body, the same curves, the same build, the sundress holding all of it the same way Debbie's bathrobe held all of it. She was Debbie standing in a garden in the evening light with dirt on her knees and a bucket of weeds beside her.

Her hair was shorter, lighter, a tomboyish cut that sat just above her shoulders and had a piece of grass in it. She stood more loosely, weight on one hip, shoulders open instead of pulled up. Debbie held herself like she was bracing for a hit. This woman held herself like she'd never been hit and didn't expect to be.

I knew they looked identical. I'd played the game. Same character model, every player noticed, the wiki had a whole section about it. I'd clicked through Diane's route and seen her sprites and thought huh, same art, lazy devs.

Seeing it on a real face was different. Seeing it was Debbie's face on a woman looking at me with warmth that had no grief in it.

"Well, hello there." Her voice was casual and warm, lower than Debbie's, with a drawl that Debbie didn't have. "You must be Arthur. Debbie's told me all about you."

"All good things, I hope."

"Mostly." She grinned. The grin was wider than Debbie's smiles, less careful, more teeth. She pulled off her gardening gloves and tucked them into the pocket of the sundress. "I'm Diane. Welcome to my garden. It's a mess."

"It looks like a garden."

"That's what I keep telling it." She gestured at the rows around her. "I've been fighting these weeds since spring and the weeds are winning. You any good with plants?"

"I'm willing."

"Willing's enough. Grab a pair of gloves from the shed and we'll see how you do."

I grabbed gloves. They were stiff and smelled like old leather and the fingers were too big. Diane put me on the row next to hers and showed me which were weeds and which were the things she was trying to grow and the difference was less obvious than I expected. She talked while we worked. She told me the farm had been in her family and then it hadn't been and then she'd bought it back because she missed the dirt. She told me the wheelbarrow was broken and had been broken for a month and she kept meaning to fix it. She asked about school and I told her about Bissette's class and she laughed and said she'd taken French in high school and the only word she remembered was fromage.

"That's cheese," I said.

"I know it's cheese. That's why I remembered it. Who forgets cheese?"

The dirt was warm under my knees. The evening light was going orange and the shadows from the tomato stakes were getting long and the air smelled like soil and green things and underneath that, when the breeze shifted, Diane. She smelled like citrus. Like she'd been cutting lemons before I got here, or like her soap had lemon in it.

I pulled weeds. She pulled weeds beside me and her knee was close to mine and the sundress had ridden up to mid-thigh and her legs were tan and had a smear of dirt on one shin and I was pulling weeds and thinking about the fact that the woman next to me had Debbie's face and Debbie's body in a sundress with dirt on her legs and I was eighteen and this was exactly what it felt like to be eighteen regardless of whether some part of me was twenty-six and should have known better.

"You're quiet," Diane said.

"Just concentrating."

"On weeds?"

"They're tricky."

She laughed. The laugh was genuine and unguarded and the grin came back and the grin was devastating because it was Debbie's mouth doing something Debbie never did.

We finished the row. She stood up and brushed the dirt off her knees and stretched and the stretch lifted the sundress and her stomach was flat and tan and the straps pulled tight over her shoulders and she caught me not looking because I was looking at the shed, at the tools on the hooks, at anything that wasn't the woman stretching in front of me, and the not-looking was probably more obvious than looking would have been.

"Lemonade?" she said.

"Sure."

She went inside. I sat on the porch steps and took off the gloves and my hands were dirty and there was a blister forming on my palm where the glove had rubbed. The porch was wide and the boards were old and a wind chime was hanging from the roof and it was making a sound that was halfway between music and an accident. A bird landed on the fence post near the garden, sat there for a second, and left.

Diane came back with two glasses. She sat down next to me on the porch step and her knee bumped mine when she settled. She didn't move it. I didn't move mine. Her knee was warm against the side of my leg and the lemonade was cold and for a few seconds those two temperatures were all I was thinking about.

The lemonade was good. Sweet but with a tartness underneath it that sat on the back of my tongue. She drank from her glass and I watched her mouth on the rim and her throat when she swallowed and then she lowered the glass and her eyes were on me.

She'd caught me.

Her mouth curved. She looked at me looking at her and the corner of her mouth went up and she took another sip of lemonade and then she was looking at the garden again.

"Debbie says you're a good kid," she said. "She talks about you a lot."

"She's been good to me."

"She's good to everyone. That's Debbie." Diane looked at her lemonade. Swirled the glass. "She's been having a hard time since Frank. We all have, but her especially. She holds everything in, you know? Doesn't let anybody see her struggle."

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

"She's lucky to have you in that house." Diane looked at me again, and the resemblance to Debbie was so strong that for a second I saw Debbie sitting next to me on a porch with dirt on her knees and lemon on her breath, and then the second passed and it was Diane again, the short hair and the loose posture and the grin that was already coming back.

"You're welcome here anytime," she said. "The weeds aren't going anywhere and the company's nice."

"I'll come back."

"Good." She knocked her knee against mine. Once. Deliberate. "Bring your own gloves next time. Mine are too big for you."

I finished the lemonade. She took the glass. I walked back through the garden and the gate and the path and the yard and into the house and Debbie was in the kitchen serving chicken onto plates and she looked up when I came in.

"How was she?"

"Good. She's good."

"Did she make lemonade?"

"Yeah."

Debbie smiled. A real one, or close to it. "She always makes lemonade. It's her thing." She set a plate in front of me. "Wash your hands, sweetie. You've got dirt under your nails."

I washed my hands. The dirt came off. The blister on my palm stung under the water. I sat down and ate Debbie's chicken and I looked at Debbie across the table and I thought about the woman next door who had her face and a different laugh and a knee that had been warm against mine while we drank lemonade on a porch and neither of us had moved.

Two of them. Same face, same body, and they were best friends and they lived fifty yards apart and the game had not adequately prepared me for any of this.

I ate the chicken. It was good. Debbie always made it good.