When Marit went to live by the coast, she left the key to her shed with the two women on either side of her: Hedda, who had gardened next to her for thirty years, and Rena, who had moved in four springs ago and learned most of what she knew over Marit's fence.
The coast was far, and Marit didn't write. Nobody expected her to. She had said, the week she left, that she was done with letters the way some people are done with stairs.
In the shed, on the shelf above the potting bench, was a jar. Brown glass, a wax seal, and a label in her square hand: Beans. Grandmother's. Last of them.
Everyone on the lane knew those beans. Marit grew a short row every year, saved the fattest pods, and wouldn't give a single seed away. She said the line had come over a sea in a coat pocket. Nobody else had them. Nobody else would ever have them unless somebody planted the jar.
Rena found it first, in March, and came to Hedda's door holding it in both hands like it might wake up.
"We should plant them," she said. "She'd want them planted. They're no good sitting in a jar."
Hedda looked at the jar for a long time. "Did she say so?"
"I asked her once." Rena was already smiling at the memory. "Last summer, over the fence. I said, if you ever leave, what happens to the beans? And she said, Oh, if anybody's got the room."
"That's what she said? Those words?"
"Those words."
Hedda took the jar and turned it so the label faced her. "Then I don't know what she wanted."
Rena's smile went somewhere. "It's a yes. She said if anybody's got the room. We've got the room."
They sat in Hedda's kitchen with the jar between them on the oilcloth, and Hedda counted on her fingers, which was how she argued.
"One. She meant yes, plant them, and if anybody's got the room was her way of saying it without fuss. She hated fuss.
"Two. She meant no, and she was being polite, because you'd asked kindly and she didn't want to tell you no over a fence.
"Three. She didn't know. You asked her a question she'd never asked herself, and she gave you the first soft thing that came out.
"Four." Hedda stopped with one finger still folded. "Four is the one I can't put down. Maybe she wanted it so much she couldn't say so. Maybe saying yes, plant them out loud would have meant admitting she was going to leave them. Or maybe she didn't think it was hers to ask. Her grandmother's beans. Who was she to say what happens to them after."
Rena said, "That's four and five."
"Fine. Five."
"Then three of those are yes."
"Three of them are yes," Hedda agreed. "And you and I both love her, and you and I both want to see that row come up again. So the ones that sound like yes are the ones we'd hear even if she'd said nothing at all."
Rena didn't answer that. She picked a crumb off the oilcloth and put it down again somewhere else.
"It's not that you're wrong," Hedda said. "You might be right. I just don't trust myself to pick, because I know which one I want."
The trouble was that a jar of seed is not a thing you can half plant. Once a bean is in the ground it's a plant or it's rot. And the ones you don't plant don't wait forever either. Old seed loses itself a little every year. So the jar was a question that was also slowly answering itself, and leaving it on the shelf was a choice too, just a quieter one.
Rena said that, more or less. She said it angrily, because she was near tears, and Hedda let her.
Then Hedda got up, took a saucer from the rack, and laid a folded paper towel on it. She ran the tap until it was cold and wet the towel through.
"What's that for?"
"My mother did it with any seed she wasn't sure of. Ten on a wet towel, on the windowsill. See how many wake up." She broke the wax with a butter knife, tipped out ten beans, and pressed the seal back down over the rest as well as it would go. "Ten. Not the jar."
"And if they come up?"
"Then we know the seeds can."
"And then we plant the rest."
Hedda folded the towel over the ten beans and set the saucer by the window. "Then we know the seeds can," she said again.
They watched it for eleven days. Rena came over every morning and lifted the corner of the towel like a lid on a pot. Nothing, nothing, nothing. On the seventh day one bean had split its skin. By the eleventh, six of the ten had pushed out a pale curl of root, blind and pointed and absolutely sure of where down was.
Rena carried the saucer to the door to look at them in better light. She was laughing a little.
"Six," she said. "They're alive. Hedda, they're alive."
"They are."
"So."
Hedda came and stood beside her and looked at the six curls of root for a long while.
"It told us the seeds could," she said. "It didn't tell us she would."
The six roots kept growing on the sill, because roots don't wait to be told. The jar went back on the shelf above the potting bench. That afternoon Hedda wrote a letter to an address on the coast that had never once written back, and walked it to the box herself.
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