The garden was down to its last good week, and she was on her knees in it, working the vines loose ahead of a frost that was still a month off but that she liked to beat to the punch.
He came out to tell her dinner could keep warm a while longer, and the screen door caught behind him before he'd finished the sentence — the smell stopped him on the step, crushed tomato leaf and warm dirt, the underside of August.
She had her sleeves pushed to the elbow, dirt to the wrist, and her shirt had slipped off one shoulder the way work does to clothes that dressing never quite manages. The last low sun was doing something to that shoulder that had nothing to do with dinner.
He'd had twenty-six years to get used to that shoulder. He couldn't have said, standing there with a dish towel still in one hand, why it undid him tonight the way it had the summer he first watched her kneel in someone else's garden, taking raspberries she hadn't been offered.
"Half of it just let go this year," she said, without turning around, and held up a tomato split clean along its equator, going soft and sweet from too much sun. "Windfall. Can't sell it. Can't really wait on it either."
He crossed the row instead of answering and came down behind her, close enough that his knees bracketed the backs of hers in the loose dirt, and put his hands over hers on the vine she was still working free.
"I've got four more feet of these," she said, half a laugh already in it.
"They'll keep," he said, mouth at her shoulder, at the place the shirt had given up on.
She let the vine go. Behind them the porch light came on by itself, timed for a dinner that was going to hold a while longer, and the last of the color went out of the sky slow, in no more hurry to leave than they were.