"Couldn't leave her. She needs the drops every hour." He turns back to straightening a stack of chard that didn't need straightening.
I keep looking at the box. The rabbit in her flannel nest with her ridiculous tiny splint. Before he loaded his truck this morning, before the stall, the customers, the whole day — he made her somewhere soft to be. Built his morning around the fact of her.
I had a rabbit when I was eight. Her name was Clover and she was grey with one white ear and she died over a weekend while we were at my grandmother's and I came home and she was just gone. I cried for three days and my mother saidshe was just a rabbit, sweetheartand I understood even then that she was entirely missing the point.
I look at the box. I look at the man.
"Is she going to be okay?"
He considers this with the seriousness it deserves. "Leg's clean. No infection. She's eating." A beat. "Good chance."
"What happens to her after today?"
"Keep her somewhere quiet till the leg heals. Release her when she's ready."
I should go. I have a loaf of bread from two stalls back and nowhere particular to be and this man has customers coming.
"I had one," I say. "When I was eight. A rabbit. She died while I was away. I never got to know she was okay first."
"You want to see where this one ends up? Make sure she gets a happy ending?" he says.
He's already turning to lift a crate. Like it's a simple thing to offer. Like he's got nothing against it either way and it's entirely up to me.
It takes me about half a second.
"Yeah," I say. "I do."
I am aware it’s weird to follow a stranger home because of a rabbit.
I follow his truck out of Silver Ridge, through the valley, past the second ridge, up a gravel road through pine that opens without warning into a property that makes me ease off the accelerator without meaning to.
Farmhouse, old and tended. Long porch. A kitchen garden along the south side in dark, straight-edged beds. Behind it, rows of vegetables. A chicken coop with a few hens moving in the sun. White boxes at the tree line — beehives, four of them. And along the fence, something tall and purple-blue that is absolutely covered in bees moving through it like slow, deliberate traffic.
I get out of my car and stand there.
I've lived in cities my whole adult life. I know what quiet is supposed to sound like — the absence of things. This isn't that. This is full: wind in the pines, a hen making a low satisfied sound, water somewhere I can't see. It doesn't feel like anything's missing. It feels like a frequency I forgot existed.
He's unloading crates, unhurried. He carries the rabbit box last, level and careful, and takes it to the porch where a very old dog lifts his head from a folded blanket and regards us both with ancient, untroubled eyes.
"That's Burl," the man says.
"And you're… uh," I stop. We've been talking for forty minutes and I don't know his name.
"Everett."
"Sloane."
He nods once. Crouches to check on the rabbit, straightens to his full height, looks at me standing in his driveway.
"Coffee?"
I look at the farm. The bees working the purple flowers. Burl putting his grey head back down with a sigh that seems to come from the floor of him. The small rabbit safe in her box on the porch of a man who got up this morning and decided she needed someone.
I look at Everett. Just for a second. The lines at the corners of his eyes. The way he's standing, like a man with nowhere else he'd rather be.
"Yeah," I say. "Okay."
two
