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of self-help tomes that Helene had pushed on him, books that turned out to be smarter than he had thought, that pinpointed some of his feelings with embarrassing precision and almost always ended by recommending meditation. Which he tried—he tried everything. He apologized to He- lene on her voice mail and he ate less meat and he cut out most of the caffeine and all of the booze and with them the twin drugs of rage and self- pity, waking in the morning refreshed and calm and with a rare sense of clarity about the life he was no longer ashamed to say he was wrong to have left. Larry and Anders wheeled the top dressing over to a row of pots and packed it with their bare hands. “Not too tight,” Larry said. “Like you’re tucking them in.” They worked in si- lence. Occasionally a fine mist would spray over the rows like in the produce aisle at a super- market but otherwise it was still and quiet. “So,” Larry said when they had them all packed. “Should we talk numbers?” “Why don’t we go inside.”

a warming drawer.” The coffee machine gurgled. Larry poured them two mugs and held his to his lips, smil- ing. “So,” he said, the steam fogging the bot- toms of his glasses. Anders told him what he owed. Larry took a small sip, seemed to let it lin- ger on his tongue, and swallowed. “And here I thought you might have come by for a visit.” “Look,” Anders said. “I don’t want you to loan me all of it.” Larry crossed the kitchen to a drawer that held a leather binder of checks. “Seriously, I was thinking maybe about an in- vestment,” Anders continued. “Didn’t you say you knew a kid who was into some new high-yield—” Larry wrote the check, tore it out, and held it for him. “Look,” saidAnders. “You know I can’t take that.” “You still love her?” said Larry. “I’m sorry?” Larry held his gaze. “You heard me.” Anders took the check. He helped Larry until the sun was low and even the greenhouse was dark. His hands and

in the ground. “Touch the place where we in- tersect with the earth, where our food comes from and where we’re eventually headed, get that stuff under your fingernails,” he said, “and you’re changed forever.” He’d been inviting classes from Bridgeport out there, elementary- school kids who had no idea their hamburger was cow and thought food came from bodegas. “Mostly I want them digging in the dirt,” he said. “That’s enough. I discovered the hard way they’re all plant murderers.” In the week since Anders’s humiliating scrape with the law—a ridiculous incident, when he thought about it, the behavior of a crazy per- son—he’d been doing some evaluating. From what he remembered of that night, which un- fortunately was almost everything, he recalled elucidating for the police officer that it wasn’t breaking and entering if he had a key to the front door, not to mention if the house was in his name, and especially if his wife—ex- wife, whatever—was standing right there. He remembered pointing, a lot of pointing, and though all the cop had done was scribble si-

Larry lived in the original farmhouse on Beachside, a property that had been divvied up into an entire avenue of waterfront estates, walled-offmonuments with service entrances and wrought-iron gates and hunks of modern sculpture strewn about the front lawns.

his pants were filthy and as he drove home he could feel a smudge of dirt on his brow and a calm sense of accomplishment. It had been ten days since the party and already he felt re- newed. Ten more like this and he might end up with a decent Christmas after all. Excerpted from the book The Land of Steady Habits by Ted Thompson. Copyright © 2014 by Ted Thompson. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. Ted Thompson is a graduate of the Iowa Writ- ers Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship. His work has appeared in Tin House and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He was born in Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn with his wife. *

lently in his pad, the lights on his car still whirling, and all Helene and Donny had done was stand there staring at him in their pj’s and terry-cloth robes, that was enough. He’d rid- den home in the back of the squad car with his forehead against the window and a Budweiser button still blinking on his lapel. What followed, though, was a morning of such raw clarity, such sober awareness, that he found himself waking at dawn, flinging open the curtains on the low cotton sky and cleaning his condo to the grout. He filled his cabinets with groceries, bought end tables from a design store, and rearranged the furniture until it felt like a room that a person might want to be in. He took a brisk morning walk and spent the evening with books, adventure stories mostly, though over the week that followed he also ventured into the shelf

Larry’s kitchen was an open palace of granite and brushed steel that made even Anders’s ren- ovation seem modest. The range had eight dif- ferent burners, none of which seemed to have been used, and the refrigerator was one of those restaurant-grade bunkers, the kind with a door that you had to use your whole body weight to open. They scrubbed their hands at the sink with a rough powdery substance that Larry said could also take the stain out of the tub, and he punched a button on the coffee machine. The afternoon sun burned through the clouds and for a moment the countertops were ablaze, the whole room awash in white. There was no way Larry had designed this kitchen himself. “Nope,” he said when Anders asked. “Course not. This was her last project—took two full years! Turns out nothing says ‘It’s over’ quite like

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