The first two weeks with her new plants from Lutey’s Flower Shop were full of trepidation. She wasn’t sure if she liked sticking her finger into the soil to gauge whether a plant needed water, and she was never sure whether she’d poured too much. It all seemed so arbitrary. That none of her plants shriveled seemed like a genuine miracle. One of the library books she’d borrowed said that an occasional dead leaf wasn’t a bad thing; it only needed to be pruned. When she spotted her first dead leaf on a croton, its brownness having become a baked crisp that popped off its stem easily, she wondered again: Did she truly have a green thumb? Yet, as she monitored the progress of her plants every morning, she felt a quiet satisfaction in seeing them thrive. She no longer fretted over the few dead l
