Mira found the mint growing through a crack beneath the station bench. She rubbed one leaf between her fingers. It smelled like the tea her sister Tess made when she came home late.
Tess had three days before she left for her first job in another town. Mira wanted to sit with her under that bench’s crooked roof once more. Instead, Tess was upstairs folding clothes, and a notice on the wall said the old platform would be knocked down on Monday.
“They could leave one bench,” Mira said.
“They won’t,” said someone beneath it.
A small man in a brown coat stood where there had been only shade. His boots were muddy. In his hands he held a gate no bigger than Mira’s lunch box.
“Is that your mint?” she asked.
“My garden. The mint is the part you can see.”
His name was Pell. Behind the wall, he explained, the roots joined a little garden where he could walk unseen. When the wall fell, its hidden space would go too.
“Move it,” Mira said.
“Once. I can move one living root into soil freely given by its owner. Everything still joined to that root can come with it. After that, I stay where I’ve gone.”
He showed her a pale stem he had cut that morning. It lay in his pocket like ordinary mint.
“This won’t travel with me. You could grow it in a pot, if you like. But it won’t bring my garden.”
Mira knew a whole courtyard full of soil. “My aunt will give you hers.”
Pell put down his tiny gate. “Did she say so?”
“She likes plants.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Mira ran home and found Aunt Bea hanging sheets across the courtyard.
“We need your garden,” she said. “All of it.”
Bea lowered a wet sheet. “I need it too.”
“A small person is going to lose his home.”
“And where will I hang these?”
Mira looked at the ropes, the washing basket and the narrow path between the beds. She had pictured an empty place. It was not empty at all.
That night she asked Tess to come to the station. Tess listened to Pell’s account without laughing. Then she squatted beside the crack and smelled the mint.
“How much ground do you need?” she asked.
“A bed as long as that bench. Enough depth for the root. A fence to keep boots out. And some privacy.”
“Would the corner behind Bea’s shed do?” Tess asked Mira.
Mira had forgotten that corner. There was no washing rope above it, only three broken pots and a pile of old stones.
They took Pell to see it the next morning. Bea asked him to point out his boundaries. He paced the bed with small, serious steps. She moved one stone, then another.
“Here,” she said. “You may have this soil. The path stays clear, and my laundry stays in the sun.”
Pell took off his cap. “That will do.”
The bed still needed digging. Mira wanted Tess to stay another week and help build everything. Tess shook her head.
“I start on Tuesday. I can give you tomorrow afternoon.”
Mira almost told her that one afternoon wasn’t enough. Then she looked at the packed bag beside Tess’s bed.
“We’ll need a spade,” she said.
The next afternoon, they lifted broken pots and loosened the hard soil. Tess carried two buckets from the water tap. Mira fetched another, slower and with more splashing. Bea found enough short boards for a low fence.
Before dusk, Pell went back to the platform and laid his hand on the mint. Mira stood beside him. For a moment the leaves curled inward, and a thin root slid from the crack like a shoelace being drawn through a hole.
Pell carried it wrapped in damp cloth. He did not turn the whole courtyard green. He pressed the root into the prepared bed and sat down, exhausted, while Tess watered it.
“How long?” Mira asked.
“Days,” he said. “Give a growing thing days.”
On Monday morning, Tess went to the station with her bag. Mira gave her the cut stem, now standing in a little pot of soil. They sat on their bench until Tess’s train arrived.
“Write when it grows,” Mira said.
“You too.”
Mira watched the train go. That evening she sat on the new bench beside Bea’s shed. It was only a plank on two blocks. The bed behind its little fence still looked bare.
Then she saw one green tip beside Pell’s gate. She drew it in a letter to Tess, exactly as small as it was.
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