Chapter 1

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The first warm Saturday of April smelled like wet earth and old leaves and the kind of promise that only spring knows how to make. Jalil had his shoes off in the grass before the front door had even finished shutting behind him. His baba called after him to be careful, and his mama called after him to watch for baby Layli's dandelions, and Jalil called back that he would, he would, he would, as he ran down Maple Street in his socks.

The empty lot was at the far end of the street, past Mrs. Gable's blue house, past Diego's abuela's garden of tomato cages, past the big oak with the knot that looked like an eye. It was not a park. It was not a yard. It was nobody's and everybody's, a square of messy green between two houses, with a lopsided mulberry tree and a patch of wild mint that you could smell before you saw.

The Maple Street Kids had named it the Lot with a capital L.

"Jalil!" Amaya was already there, standing on top of an old cinderblock like it was a mountain. Her two mothers had let her wear rain boots and a winter hat together, and she didn't look cold or warm, just happy. "Jalil, look! I found a rolly-polly as big as a raisin!"

"Bigger than a raisin," said Diego, who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt with a stick in his hand, drawing something in the mud. Diego was eight, which he said did not mean he was the boss, but which everybody knew sort of did. "Raisins are small. That's at least a grape."

"A grape rolly-polly," said Mei, softly, from her spot under the mulberry tree. She had her notebook open in her lap. Mei always had her notebook. On the cover, in stickers that had faded from being pulled off and stuck back on too many times, it said VIRTUES. "I'm going to draw him."

Tommy was there too, swinging his arms like he didn't know what to do with them. He had joined the Maple Street Kids back in the fall, and sometimes he still looked surprised to be inside the circle instead of outside it. Noor, the quietest of them all, was crouched near the mulberry, running her fingers through the cool dirt as if she were reading it.

Jalil skidded to a stop in the middle of them, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt. "It's warm! It's warm enough! Do you know what that means?"

"It means worms," said Amaya, holding up a wriggly pink line triumphantly.

"It means THE LOT IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS," Jalil announced, flinging his arms wide. "Fort-building season. Bug-finding season. Mulberry-waiting season."

Mei smiled without looking up from her drawing.

And then Diego stood up, very slowly, because he had seen something the others had not. His face did the thing it did when his abuela told him bad news in Spanish, a stillness that came before he could find English words for it.

"Guys," he said.

"What?" said Tommy.

Diego pointed.

On the far edge of the Lot, pushed right into the soft spring dirt, was a sign. It had not been there yesterday. It was tall and white and new, and it had four words on it in big block letters, and a phone number underneath.

FOR SALE COMMERCIAL LOT

Jalil read it twice. His grin slid off his face and landed somewhere in the grass.

"For sale," he whispered. "The Lot is for sale."

Nobody said anything for a long time. Amaya's rolly-polly crawled off her palm and onto her sleeve and up toward her hat, and she didn't even notice.

Mei closed her notebook very carefully, like she was closing a door.

"Who sells a lot?" Tommy said at last.

"Somebody who owns it," Diego said.

"Somebody owns it?" Amaya asked, astonished. "A whole person owns all of this?"

Noor was staring at the sign. Her English had grown a lot since she came to Maple Street last year, but some words she still had to turn around in her head before she could use them. "Commercial," she said slowly. "What is commercial?"

Diego rubbed the back of his neck the way his abuelo used to. "It means stores. Or offices. Or something with a parking lot."

"A parking lot?" Amaya's voice went high. "Instead of the Lot?"

The wind moved through the mulberry tree and the tree whispered back like it already knew.

Jalil felt his eyes get hot. He was seven, which was old enough not to cry in front of his friends, which meant he had to swallow hard and look up at the sky and think about airplanes until the feeling went away.

"We have to tell somebody," he said finally. "We have to tell somebody right now."

"Who?" said Tommy.

"Anybody," Jalil said. "Everybody. My baba. My mama. Diego's abuela. Mrs. Gable."

Diego nodded slowly. He looked at the sign, and at the mulberry tree, and at the patch of mint that was just starting to push its green noses out of the winter dirt.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

They walked home in a line, the way ducks do, Jalil at the front and little Amaya last because her boots were too big and she kept stopping to pick things up. Nobody ran. Nobody shouted. The spring sun was still shining and the wind still smelled green, but something had changed, and all six of them felt it, even if only the oldest ones had words for it yet.

Behind them, the FOR SALE sign leaned a little in the soft earth, like it knew it did not belong.

"Ay, Diego, mi cielo," she said, "why do you bring me six long faces? Did the sky fall?"

"Sort of, Abuela," Diego said.

She turned then, wiping her hands on a striped towel, and she looked at each of their faces one by one, the way a careful doctor looks at a thermometer. Abuela was small and round and the top of her head came barely up to Diego's shoulder, but when she looked at you, you felt seen all the way through.

"The Lot," Diego said. "Somebody's selling it. There's a sign."

Abuela's eyebrows lifted. "The Lot? Our lot? The one with the mulberries?"

"Our lot," Amaya said firmly, as if saying it loudly would make it true.

Abuela sat down in her red kitchen chair and patted her knee, and Amaya climbed right up without being asked twice, because Abuela's lap was a place everybody wanted to be. Jalil and Mei sat on the bench by the window. Tommy leaned on the refrigerator. Noor stood very still by the door, as if she wasn't sure yet whether she was allowed to be inside.

"Noor, ven, come," said Abuela, and Noor came, and Abuela squeezed her hand. "Now. Tell me the whole story. Slow, like you are telling a soup recipe."

They told her, all of them at once, which was not slow at all. A sign. For sale. Commercial. Parking lot. Offices. Nobody to stop it.

Abuela listened until they had run all the way out of words. Then she was quiet for a minute. She looked at her wall, where she kept photographs of everybody she loved, including, since last Ridván, a photograph of all six kids squished together at the Naw-Rúz party.

"Hmm," she said finally. "Hmm, hmm, hmm."

"Abuela, what?" Diego said.

"I am thinking of something," she said. "But first, tell me. If the Lot could be anything. Anything at all, besides offices. What would you want it to be?"

"A park," said Jalil at once.

"A fort," said Tommy.

"A place for the rolly-pollies," said Amaya.

"A garden," said Mei, quietly.

Everybody turned to look at her.

"A garden," Abuela repeated. Her eyes lit up behind her glasses. "Ay, Mei, qué linda. A garden."

"A community garden," Diego said slowly, catching fire from his abuela's face. "Like the one by the church. Where anybody can come."

"A garden," said Noor, and the word came out of her with something like surprise, as if she had not known the word lived in her mouth yet. "A garden. Yes."

Abuela clapped her hands together once, softly. "Now. Children. Listen. In my old neighborhood, when I was a girl smaller than Amaya, there was a place that was going to be a factory. Just like your Lot. And the families, we said no. We said, this will be our garden instead. And we wrote letters and we went to the city and we did not stop until they listened."

"Did it work?" Tommy asked.

"The tomatoes I grew up on came from that garden," Abuela said. "What do you think?"

"We should do it," Jalil said. "We should do it here."

"We are children," Noor said, carefully. "Children cannot buy a lot."

"No," said Abuela. "But children can help a neighborhood know what it wants. And children can speak. And children can plant. And children can teach grown-ups how to remember what is important."

Mei had opened her Virtues Notebook and was already writing, her pencil moving fast, as if she were afraid the idea would fly away before she caught it.

"A garden of virtues," she whispered. "Each of us picks one. Each of us plants one."

"A virtues garden," Amaya said, rolling the words around in her mouth. "A VIRTUES GARDEN."

Abuela laughed, and her laugh was warm and small and exactly the right size for her kitchen. "Mi amor," she said. "You are already Bahá'ís, all of you. You cannot help it. You think in gardens."

They met that night in Jalil's living room, because Jalil's house was in the middle of Maple Street and because Jalil's mother always had snacks. Baby Layli was asleep upstairs, and Jalil's baba had pulled the big coffee table into the middle of the rug and put paper and markers on it, which meant that the meeting was Serious.

"Okay," Diego said. He was holding a clipboard. Nobody had given him a clipboard. He had just brought one. "We have to be organized."

"You always say that," Amaya said, her mouth full of cracker.

"Because it is always true," Diego said.

Jalil's baba sat on the couch with his tea, not saying anything, just watching them, the way he did when he thought they could work it out themselves. Jalil loved his baba for this. A lot of baba's friends interrupted kids. His baba listened like a kid's words were as real as his own.

"So," Diego said. "Step one. We need people to know. A lot of people."

"A petition," said Mei. She had read about petitions in a book.

"A what?" said Amaya.

"A paper," Mei explained. "Where you say what you want, and then people sign their names if they agree."

"OH," said Amaya. "Like at the grocery store when the lady with the table wants you to care about trees."

"Exactly like that," said Mei, smiling.

"Step two," said Diego. "The city. Abuela said we have to go to the city. There's a meeting every month where people can speak. The city council."

"We have to speak?" Tommy said. "In front of people?" Tommy was not a fan of speaking in front of people. Tommy's face had gone a little gray.

"Not all of us," Jalil said quickly. "Just one. Or two. Whoever wants to."

"Not me," said Tommy, relieved.

"Step three," said Diego. "The plan. We have to show them what the garden will look like. Like. A picture. A map."

"I can draw it," said Mei, whose hand was already twitching toward her pencil.

"Step four," said Diego, and now he looked at all of them very seriously. "The virtues."

Everybody got quiet.

"Abuela said," Diego went on, "that what makes our garden different from any other garden is that each of us is going to plant one virtue. Something we want to grow in ourselves, and in the neighborhood. So. We each have to pick."

Jalil's baba spoke for the first time. "You do not have to pick tonight," he said gently. "A virtue is a big choice. You might want to sleep on it. You might want to ask yourself, 'What does my neighborhood most need from me?'"

"I know mine," said Jalil.

Everybody looked at him.

"Generosity," he said. His ears went a little pink. "Because. You know. My mama and baba host Feasts, and we share food, and it makes people smile. I want to grow something that makes a lot of food. Like. A lot. Enough to give away all summer."

"Pumpkins," said Jalil's baba, smiling into his tea.

"Pumpkins," Jalil agreed, beaming.

"I know mine too," said Mei. It was surprising to hear Mei speak up without being asked, but her face was sure. "Truthfulness. I want to plant sunflowers, because sunflowers always turn their faces toward the light. They don't hide. They don't pretend. They just. They just face it."

Jalil's baba nodded, very slowly, and Jalil saw his eyes get a little shiny.

"Mine is courage," said Amaya, who had climbed onto the arm of the couch and who was now about to fall off it. "I'm going to plant red flowers. Red is brave. Mama said red tulips in the front and they look like little fires."

"Tulips are a good choice, Amaya," said Jalil's baba. "They have to sleep in the cold dark all winter, and then they push themselves up anyway. That is a very brave flower."

"Mine," said Diego, "is unity." He hadn't planned to say it, but it came out of him like it had been waiting. "Because we're six different kids, and we fit. So I want to plant one garden bed, but with six different herbs. All together. Cilantro. Basil. Mint. Parsley. Chives. Thyme. All of them next to each other. All of them friends."

"One bed, many herbs," said Jalil's baba. "I like this very much, Diego."

Tommy had been quiet. Everybody looked at him gently.

"I don't know yet," he said. "Can I say tomorrow?"

"Of course," Jalil's baba said. "A virtue is a big choice."

Noor had been quiet too. She sat very straight on the edge of the chair, the way she always sat, as if she were a guest in every house she entered, even the ones she had been to a hundred times.

"I have mine," she said softly. "Hope."

"Oh, Noor," Mei said, and her voice was full of something bigger than seven-year-olds were supposed to have room for.

"My teta, my grandma, she had a tree," Noor said. "In her garden. Back home. Before. An olive tree. My aunt, she came last year with my cousin, and she brought with her a little one. A baby olive tree, from my teta's tree. In a pot. It is in my aunt's kitchen now. But my aunt says, if it is a real garden, a garden in the ground, she will give it to us. For the garden."

Nobody said anything. Jalil's baba set his teacup down very carefully on its saucer.

"Noor," he said. "That would be the most beautiful olive tree on Maple Street."

"Yes," said Noor. "I think so also."

Tommy walked home slowly that night, kicking a pinecone in front of him. His house was only three doors down from Jalil's, but he took the long way, because his head was too full.

Every other kid had picked a virtue like the virtue had been waiting for them. Generosity. Truthfulness. Courage. Unity. Hope. Big, glowing words, like stained glass.

Tommy did not feel like stained glass. Tommy felt like a sidewalk.

He had joined the Maple Street Kids last fall. Before that, he had been the kid whose dad yelled in the front yard and whose mom never came to parent night. His clothes had been the wrong kind of clothes. He had eaten his lunch in the bathroom once, in third grade, for three whole weeks, before he figured out that the bench by the fence was always empty at recess.

And then one day Jalil, with his big open face and his always-too-loud voice, had just. Walked up. And invited him. Not to sit somewhere. To belong somewhere. It had been the biggest thing that had ever happened to Tommy, and he had almost cried, and he had said "okay" in a voice so small he was sure Jalil had not heard it.

Jalil had heard it.

Now Tommy was supposed to pick a virtue that would sit in the ground in a garden and represent him forever.

He stopped on the sidewalk. The stars were out. On Mrs. Gable's porch, the porch light was on, and a single silhouette was rocking in the rocking chair that had been empty for two years before Diego's abuela finally convinced Mrs. Gable to use it again.

"Hi, Tommy," came Mrs. Gable's voice, dry and soft as paper.

"Hi, Mrs. Gable."

"You're walking awfully slow for a boy who ought to be home for dinner."

"I'm thinking."

"Ah," said Mrs. Gable. "Thinking weather. Want to come sit?"

Tommy went up the porch steps. Mrs. Gable had a knitted blanket over her knees and a cup of something hot in her hands. She did not offer him any, because she knew he did not like tea. She had learned that about him.

"What's the thinking about?"

"Virtues," said Tommy.

Mrs. Gable did not laugh. Mrs. Gable almost never laughed, but she also almost never acted like what children said was silly.

"That's a big thinking," she said.

"Everybody picked one," he said. "And I can't. I can't pick."

"What do you mean you can't?"

"Everybody else has. A big one. A shiny one." He kicked at the porch floor. "Mei has Truthfulness. Jalil has Generosity. Noor has Hope. I don't have anything like that. I don't. I'm not like that."

Mrs. Gable was quiet for a long time. The porch light made her white hair look like a thin cloud. She tapped the arm of the rocker slowly, once, twice, three times.

"Tommy," she said. "Do you know why I started saying hello to you children?"

"No."

"It wasn't because of Jalil, who knocked on my door with pistachios. It wasn't because of Diego, who fixed my gate. It wasn't even because of Mei, who slipped a drawing of my cat under my mat. It was because of you."

Tommy looked up.

"The week after my husband passed," Mrs. Gable said, "you came to my driveway. Do you remember? My recycling bin had blown over. You picked up every can. You did not knock. You did not expect a thank-you. You just. Put them back. And left."

"I forgot I did that," Tommy whispered.

"I didn't," said Mrs. Gable. "That was kindness. That is kindness. Not the shiny kind, the kind that wants a medal. The quiet kind. The kind that just does the thing because the thing needs doing."

Tommy's eyes stung a little.

"Kindness," he said.

"Kindness," she agreed.

"Is that allowed to be a virtue?"

Mrs. Gable finally did laugh then, a small, surprised laugh, like a cough. "Tommy Burke," she said. "Kindness might be the one that holds all the others up."

Tommy sat very still on the porch, letting the word settle into him like a warm stone in a pocket.

"I'm going to plant mint," he said, after a while.

"Mint," said Mrs. Gable. "Why mint?"

"It spreads," Tommy said. "My grandma had mint in her yard once and she said you couldn't stop it if you tried. It just went everywhere and grew in everything. Kindness ought to be like that."

"Yes," said Mrs. Gable. "Yes, it ought."

The next morning, which was a Sunday, Diego was on the sidewalk by eight, which meant by nine all six kids were crammed onto the picnic table in his backyard with markers and a ruler and way too much paper.

"Top of the page," said Diego. "We need a title."

"PLEASE DO NOT MAKE OUR LOT A PARKING LOT," Amaya shouted.

"Shorter," said Diego. "And maybe. Nicer."

"We believe Maple Street deserves a garden," Mei said quietly.

Everybody looked at her. She had written it in her notebook.

"That," said Diego, smiling. "That one."

They wrote it at the top in their best printing. Mei drew a little border of vines and sunflowers around the edge. Noor drew a tiny olive tree in the corner. Amaya tried to draw a pumpkin but it came out looking like a mad potato, so she added eyes, and then it was clearly the world's angriest pumpkin, and everybody laughed until their stomachs hurt.

"Okay," said Diego. "Now. We go door to door."

"All of us?" Tommy said.

"Abuela says it's better in twos," Diego said. "So people don't feel crowded."

They paired up. Diego and Tommy took the west side of Maple Street. Jalil and Amaya took the east side. Mei and Noor took the cul-de-sac at the end.

Jalil had never knocked on so many doors in his life. He had knocked on his neighbors' doors with his mama, carrying pistachios at Naw-Rúz, or date cookies at Ridván, but he had never knocked on a door for his own idea, and it turned out to be harder than he had thought.

At the first house, a lady he did not know answered. "Yes?"

Jalil froze. His speech, which he had practiced in the mirror, flew out of his head like a bird out of an open window.

"Um," he said.

"We want a garden," Amaya said loudly, because Amaya was six, and six was too young to freeze.

"Oh," said the lady. "What kind of garden?"

"A Virtues Garden," Amaya said. "I'm doing Courage. Jalil is doing Generosity. It's a whole thing."

The lady laughed. "Well, sign me up."

She signed her name at the top of the list. Her name was Patricia Nguyen. Jalil had not even known her name.

By lunch, they had twenty-seven names. By dinner, they had forty-one. Mrs. Gable signed first on Mei and Noor's list, and then she walked with them all the way down the cul-de-sac, which she had not walked in a year and a half, and introduced them to people they had not known she knew.

Only one door did not open nicely.

It was the gray house with the white shutters, halfway down the block. The house with the lawn that always looked like somebody had vacuumed it.

Diego and Tommy knocked. They knocked again.

The door swung open. A man stood there. He was tall and thin and wearing a sweater even though it was warm. His face was the color of paper, and his eyes were the color of a closed door.

"Yes?" he said.

"Hi, Mr. Henderson," Diego said, because Diego always remembered names. "We're, um, doing a petition. About the empty lot at the end of the street."

"What about it?"

"It's being sold. For commercial. And we want to ask the city to make it a community garden instead. For the neighborhood."

Mr. Henderson read the petition. His eyes went slowly down the page. Then back up. Then down again. He did not pick up the pen.

"A community garden," he said flatly.

"Yes, sir."

"Open to everyone."

"Yes, sir. That's the whole point."

Mr. Henderson's mouth went thin. "Let me ask you something, son. Do you know what happens to a lot like that when you open it up to everyone?"

Diego blinked. "Um."

"I'll tell you. It becomes a hangout. It becomes a place for people to drink and leave trash. It becomes a place for loitering. Undesirables."

Tommy's ears got hot. He did not know the word undesirables, but he knew the feeling of it. He had felt it pointed at him before.

"Mr. Henderson," Diego said, steady, "it's for the kids. For the neighborhood. We'd take care of it."

"Kids grow up," said Mr. Henderson. "And neighborhoods change. I do not sign things like this. You boys have a nice day."

He shut the door. Not hard. Just firmly. Click.

Diego and Tommy stood on the porch for a minute. Neither of them spoke until they were back on the sidewalk.

"What's undesirables?" Tommy asked.

Diego kicked a pebble. "It's. It's a word people use. When they mean people they don't want around."

"What people?"

Diego didn't answer for a little while. Then he said, "Whoever they've decided doesn't belong."

Tommy was quiet for half a block.

"Sometimes that's me," he said.

"Yeah," said Diego. "Yeah, I know. Sometimes it's me too."

They walked the rest of the way home together, not talking, the petition heavier in Diego's hand than it had been in the morning.

"Baba," Jalil said, that night, in the kitchen while his baba made rice. "A man on our street called people undesirables. Today. To Diego and Tommy."

Jalil's baba did not turn around right away. He stirred the rice carefully. The smell of saffron filled the kitchen, warm and golden.

"Who, jaan?"

"Mr. Henderson. The gray house."

"Ah." Baba sighed, and it was the kind of sigh that had a whole story in it. "Yes. Mr. Henderson."

"You know him?"

"A little. He comes to the hardware store sometimes. He is not a happy man."

"He doesn't want the garden. Because he thinks bad people will come."

Baba turned down the heat under the rice and sat down at the table. He patted the chair next to him, and Jalil sat.

"Jalil," his baba said. "What do you think when you hear a man say something like that?"

"Angry," Jalil said at once. "It made me angry, Baba. He doesn't even know us. He doesn't even know Noor, or Tommy, or."

"Yes," said Baba. "Angry is a real feeling. Do not throw it away. Anger that sees unfairness is a good anger. But."

"But."

"But what will anger build?"

Jalil thought. "A fight?"

"Yes. Anger builds fights. And sometimes, a fight is how a thing gets done. But a garden?"

"A garden can't grow in a fight."

"A garden cannot grow in a fight," Baba repeated. "So. We have to find a different thing. Not instead of the anger. With the anger. Underneath it. Something stronger."

"What?"

Baba drummed his fingers on the table. "There is a thing the Bahá'í Writings say. 'Consort with all men in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship.' It is easy when the man is already your friend. It is hard when the man has shut the door in your face. Do you know why we do it anyway?"

"Why?"

"Because a closed door is not forever. Because a man who is afraid needs something besides our anger. He has enough anger of his own. What he has not had, perhaps, for a long time, is somebody treat him like he is a person."

Jalil chewed the inside of his cheek. "He was mean, Baba."

"Yes."

"He hurt Tommy. Tommy. Who. Who has already been hurt enough."

Baba's face softened. "Yes, jaan. I know."

"So we're just supposed to be nice to him?"

"Not just nice. Nice is easy. Love is harder. Love is when you look at a person and you ask, 'What is this person afraid of?' And then you do not pretend their fear is small. You do not pretend their meanness is okay. But you also do not pretend they are not a person."

"How?" Jalil said. "How do you do that?"

Baba smiled a little, tiredly. "Mostly, jaan, by not giving up on them. And by showing up again, even when they have been unkind."

"That's hard."

"It is. It is the hardest thing. It is also, I think, the whole thing."

Jalil sat with this for a long time. The rice steamed. From upstairs, Layli babbled at nothing, the way babies do when they are telling the ceiling important news.

"Baba," Jalil said finally, "will you come with us? When we go back to Mr. Henderson?"

"We will go back to him?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe not right away. Maybe. Maybe just. Later."

Baba reached over and put his hand on top of Jalil's, warm and rough from all the things his hands did in a day.

"Jalil-jaan," he said. "When you are ready, I will come with you. As many times as it takes."

Mei's room had one window, and the window looked out onto the Lot. From her bed, she could see the top of the mulberry tree, and in the spring, she could see it turn slowly pink, and then green, and then heavy with dark berries that stained everybody's hands.

On Monday night, she pulled her desk under the window and spread out a piece of paper so big it hung off both sides. Her cat Pearl walked across it, because cats always walk across the thing you are trying to work on, and Mei laughed and moved her.

"This is the plan, Pearl," she whispered. "This is what we are going to show the city."

She started at the corner, where the old mulberry tree was. The tree had to stay. It was the heart. Around it she drew a circle of stones and wrote benches. An old person could sit there. A tired parent could sit there. Noor could sit there.

Next to the tree, she drew Noor's olive tree, smaller than the mulberry, a little hopeful thing with narrow leaves. She wrote NOOR beside it in her best printing, and then, underneath, HOPE.

On the sunny south side, she drew Mei's sunflowers. A whole row of them, tall and bright, their faces all turned the same way. TRUTHFULNESS.

Next to the sunflowers, Jalil's pumpkin patch. She drew three fat pumpkins already, even though it was only April. GENEROSITY.

In front, where everyone coming up Maple Street would see first, she drew Amaya's tulips. A hundred small red flames. COURAGE.

In the middle, she drew one big raised bed with little labels. Cilantro. Basil. Mint. Parsley. Chives. Thyme. UNITY. That was Diego's.

Along the fence, she drew Tommy's mint, creeping along in a green wave. She drew it spilling out of the bed and onto the path, because that was the whole point. KINDNESS. It wouldn't stay where you put it. It would go everywhere.

Pearl nosed the paper. Mei scratched behind her ears.

"One more," she said.

She hesitated. In the corner, nearest the gate, she drew a small empty patch. She did not label it yet. She did not know whose patch it was. But she had a feeling that the garden would not be finished until it had a seventh.

Mrs. Gable had not been to a city council meeting in fifteen years. Her husband used to go. Her husband had cared about streetlights and speed bumps. After he died, Mrs. Gable had not cared about streetlights or speed bumps. She had not cared about much of anything.

But now there were six children on her front porch, and a paper with forty-eight names on it, and a girl named Noor who had given her, the week before, a dried rose from her mother's kitchen.

"Please come, Mrs. Gable," said Diego.

"You don't have to speak," said Jalil. "You just. You just have to be there. It helps."

"A lot of people from the neighborhood is better," said Diego. "Abuela said so."

Mrs. Gable sat in her rocking chair with her hands folded in her lap. She looked at each of them. She looked for a long time.

"Children," she said, "I haven't been inside that building since my husband was alive."

Noor said, "Then we will go with you."

Mrs. Gable's face did something complicated. Her chin quivered once. Then she pressed her lips together and nodded, one small firm nod.

"Well," she said. "All right, then. What does one wear to a city council meeting, these days?"

"I think maybe like. Church clothes?" said Diego.

"Church clothes," said Mrs. Gable. "I can do that."

The night before the council meeting, Noor's mother, whose name was Rana, sat down at the kitchen table with a piece of paper. She had made tea, strong and sweet, and she had put a plate of small almond cookies beside it, and she stared at the paper like the paper was an ocean she had to swim across.

"Mama," said Noor, in Arabic, "you don't have to do this."

"I do," said Rana, in Arabic. "If not me, who?"

"Anybody," said Noor. "Jalil's baba. Diego's abuela. Anybody."

Rana smiled, small and tired. "Habibti. When I came to this country, I could not speak. Not one word. I could not ask for bread. I could not tell the doctor what hurt. I could not say thank you to the woman who carried your brother's suitcase up the stairs. And now, a year and some months later, the city of this place is going to decide what to do with a piece of earth where my daughter wants to plant an olive tree from her teta's garden. And you think I should be quiet?"

Noor looked down.

"Habibti," her mother said, more gently. "My English will be ugly. I know."

"It is not ugly."

"It is a little ugly. But ugly English with a true heart is better than pretty English with an empty one. Do you think?"

"Yes, Mama."

"So. Help me. What do I want to say?"

Noor thought. "That the garden is a place for everybody. That it is for children. That it is for old people. That it is for new people and old people."

"Yes."

"That olive trees mean peace. Everywhere in the world, they mean peace."

"Yes, habibti."

"That the earth does not know where anyone was born. That the earth welcomes every seed."

Rana wrote. Her handwriting was careful and round. Her English was not perfect, she knew. But the paper filled up, line by line, and Noor sat beside her and did not correct anything, because her mother was right. Her mother was always right about the big things.

The city council chamber was bigger than Amaya had expected, and colder, and full of folding chairs, and there were grown-ups in grown-up clothes with grown-up folders, and a big half-circle of desks at the front where the council sat like judges in a movie.

The Maple Street Kids filed in together. Jalil's baba. Diego's abuela. Mei's mother with her camera. Amaya's two moms, one on each side of Amaya, because Amaya, for once in her small brave life, was nervous. Tommy's mom, who had started coming to things again. Noor's mother in a dark green dress, her paper folded once in her hands. And Mrs. Gable in a pressed blue suit that smelled faintly of mothballs and lavender, looking like a woman who had decided something.

The item about the Maple Street Lot came up near the end. A man from a development company spoke first. He had slides. He said words like "mixed-use" and "footprint" and "variance." He talked for a long time. Amaya leaned against Jalil and yawned loudly, and Jalil had to pinch her.

Then it was the neighborhood's turn.

Diego spoke first, because Diego had practiced, and because somebody had to break the ice.

"My name is Diego Ramirez," he said into the microphone, which made his voice sound weird and enormous and far away. "I'm eight. I live on Maple Street. I'm asking you to help us turn the empty lot at the end of our street into a community garden."

He said it clearly. He said it with a clipboard in his hand. A few people in the audience said aww, and Diego got pink, but he kept going.

He told them about the kids. He told them about the virtues. He said the word consultation, which his abuela had taught him, because in their Bahá'í community they consulted about things, and that was what they were doing, and that was what a garden was, a place where a whole neighborhood could consult about what it wanted to grow.

Mei handed up her huge drawing. The council leaned forward to look at it. One of them, a woman with gray braids, actually smiled.

Then Mrs. Gable stood up.

"My name is Eleanor Gable. I've lived on Maple Street for forty-one years. For most of the last two, I have not left my porch. Those children at the end of this row got me off of it." She paused. "If they can get me off my porch, they can grow anything. Vote for their garden."

She sat down. The room was quiet for a beat, and then somebody in the back clapped, once, and then another person, and then all of them.

Then Rana stood up.

She walked up with Noor beside her, which was not how it was supposed to go, but nobody stopped them. Noor stood at her mother's elbow like a very small guard.

Rana unfolded her paper. Her hand shook a little. She looked up, and she looked at the council, and then she looked at the whole room, and she began.

"My name is Rana," she said. "I come from Syria. I come to here one year and some. My daughter Noor is seven." She swallowed. Her accent was thick. One of the council members leaned forward to hear. "In my old home, we have a garden. It has an olive tree. My mother plant. My mother grandmother plant. Many, many years. Now, the garden is no more. But a piece of the tree, we save. A small tree. My sister bring it here. In her kitchen."

She stopped. She put her hand on Noor's head.

"My daughter, she want to plant this tree. In your empty place. She want all the children plant something. She want the street to be a garden. Not because we are sad for our garden in Syria. Because we are happy for the new garden, here. Because," and her English failed her for a second, and she found it again, "because earth, she does not ask where you are born. Earth say, come. Put your seed. I will grow."

Rana folded her paper. She did not say anything else. The whole room had gone very still.

One of the council members had her hand over her mouth.

Amaya was crying. Amaya never cried. Jalil held her hand and did not look at her, because he was crying a little too.

The vote was called. It was a show of hands.

Four. Three.

The community garden passed by one.

Outside the chamber, in the lobby, under the white fluorescent lights, Noor and Rana hugged so hard they did not let go for a long time. Mrs. Gable stood very straight with her purse over her arm and said, "Well. Forty-one years and I still say this town gets one thing right every so often." And Diego's abuela was already on the phone telling somebody, in rapid Spanish, to buy seeds tomorrow.

From the far corner of the lobby, not speaking, not smiling, his coat already on, Mr. Henderson watched.

Nobody knew he had come. Nobody had seen him come in. He had sat in the very back row, and now he was leaving, his hands pushed deep in his pockets.

Jalil saw him.

He did not wave. He just. Looked. And Mr. Henderson looked back, once, very briefly, before he turned and walked out into the night.

Jalil's baba squeezed his shoulder.

"Do not push, jaan," his baba said softly. "A closed door takes time."

"I wasn't going to push, Baba."

"Good. Then we wait. And we show up."

The Saturday of the groundbreaking was the kind of day you invent in your head when you are stuck inside in January. The sky was the blue of a marble. The air was warm but not too warm. Bees were already at the wild mint at the edge of the Lot, and the mulberry tree had small green buds that would, in another month, be berries.

There were more people than the kids had expected. The Maple Street families, yes, all of them. But also people they had not known were coming. The woman from the first house who had signed the petition. A couple with a baby in a sling. Two teenagers from the high school, pushing wheelbarrows. The man from the hardware store who knew Jalil's baba. Mrs. Gable, in gardening gloves so new they still had the tag on them.

Diego's abuela had organized the beds. Stakes were in the ground with names on them, each stake tied with a strip of bright ribbon.

GENEROSITY — Jalil — pumpkin TRUTHFULNESS — Mei — sunflower COURAGE — Amaya — red tulip UNITY — Diego — herb bed KINDNESS — Tommy — mint HOPE — Noor — olive tree

Amaya had been trying to dig a hole all morning. Amaya was six, and Amaya was small, and the hole for the tulip bulbs was supposed to be deep. Amaya's hole was not deep. Amaya's hole was more of a. Suggestion.

"I am digging a HOLE," she informed everyone loudly, from inside her hole, which came up to her knees. "A BIG HOLE. A HOLE AS BIG AS ME."

"The hole is bigger than you," Jalil pointed out.

"Then I am a SMALL GIANT," said Amaya, with dignity.

She had dirt on her cheek and dirt in her hair and dirt, somehow, in her ear. Her two mothers were laughing so hard one of them had to sit down.

Noor was in the corner where the olive tree would go. Her aunt had brought the small tree herself, in its round green pot. It was a thin, wiry little thing, with leaves that looked almost silver when the light hit them. Noor stood by the hole with one hand on the pot, as if she were introducing the tree to the ground.

Her mother came and knelt beside her.

"Are you ready, habibti?"

"I am a little scared, Mama."

"Scared?"

"What if it doesn't grow here? What if the winter is too cold, or the dirt is too different, or the tree is too. Too small."

Rana took her daughter's chin in her hand. "Noor," she said. "Do you know what an olive tree knows that most trees do not know?"

"What?"

"How to wait. An olive tree can wait a hundred years. A thousand. It will not hurry. But it will not die, either. Olive trees do not die, habibti. They just. Slow down, sometimes. Until the place is ready for them again."

Noor nodded, very seriously. Together they lifted the small tree out of its pot. Together they lowered it into the earth of Maple Street. Rana pressed the soil around the little root ball with both her hands, and Noor watched her mother's hands, and the hands were full of something more than dirt.

Mei was planting her sunflowers in a neat row. Jalil was mounding the earth into hills for his pumpkins, the way Diego's abuela had shown him, little volcanoes of dirt. Tommy was sticking mint shoots into the ground along the fence, one after another, and the air wherever he worked smelled instantly of summer.

Diego's unity bed was the funniest to look at, because his herbs were all different sizes and shapes, and the rows were not straight, and already the cilantro and the basil were leaning into each other like friends in a photograph.

Mrs. Gable knelt by Amaya's half-finished tulip hole, took the little trowel out of Amaya's hand, and quietly, efficiently, made the hole the right depth.

"There you go, General," Mrs. Gable said. "Now place the bulb."

"What's a general?"

"Somebody who's in charge of a lot of dirt."

"OH," said Amaya, delighted. "I'm the general!"

And then, in the middle of all of this, Jalil looked up, and Jalil saw him.

Mr. Henderson was standing at the edge of the Lot.

He was wearing a coat, too heavy for the day. He had a pair of new gardening gloves in one hand that he had obviously just bought. He was not smiling. He was not frowning. He was just. Standing there.

Jalil did not call out. He did not run over. He remembered his baba's voice. Do not push, jaan.

He walked up, instead, slow, to Diego.

"Diego," he said quietly. "Look."

Diego looked.

They did not speak for a moment.

Then Diego handed Jalil his clipboard, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked, not fast and not slow, over to Mr. Henderson.

Everybody noticed without exactly looking. Amaya stopped digging. Mei lowered her watering can. Mrs. Gable straightened up with one hand on the small of her back. Even Tommy, who was most comfortable not being watched, paused mid-mint.

Diego stopped about three feet from Mr. Henderson. He looked up at him. Mr. Henderson was taller than Jalil's baba. He was taller than everyone here except the man from the hardware store.

"Hi, Mr. Henderson," Diego said, in a normal voice. Not small. Not loud. Just. Normal.

Mr. Henderson cleared his throat. His hands tightened on the gardening gloves.

"Hi," he said.

Diego waited. His abuela had taught him once that sometimes the best thing to do with a silence was to let it be a silence.

Mr. Henderson looked out over the garden. At the mulberry tree. At the sunflowers that were not yet sunflowers, just tiny green hopes in a row. At Noor's olive tree, small enough to put your arm around. At the lopsided pumpkin mounds. At Tommy's mint spreading. At the ribbons on the stakes with their virtue names in a child's careful printing.

His throat moved. He said nothing for a long time.

"I wondered," he said finally, and his voice was not the same voice as the one from the porch, "if there was any room. For one more."

Diego did not even blink. "There is a spot," he said. "Mei drew one. Over there, by the gate."

He pointed. And it was true. There, in the corner near the gate, was a small empty square of earth, with no stake in it, as if it had been waiting.

Mr. Henderson looked. His face was doing a lot of things at once. None of them were the face he had worn at his door.

"What virtue," he said slowly, "is that spot?"

"It doesn't have one yet," Diego said. "We didn't pick it. It was. It was for whoever came."

Mr. Henderson closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they looked like a slightly different color.

"Patience," he said. "I would plant patience."

"What would you plant?" Diego asked. "For patience?"

"A tree," said Mr. Henderson, after a moment. "A slow one. My wife always wanted. A dogwood. She always wanted a dogwood. They take. They take years."

Diego nodded. He did not ask where Mr. Henderson's wife was. He did not need to. He had heard the way the word was.

"We can get a dogwood, Mr. Henderson," Diego said. "We can plant it today, even. My abuela has a guy."

Mr. Henderson made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and something else. "Of course your abuela does."

He put the gardening gloves on. They were bright yellow, and they looked brand new, and his hands looked older and thinner inside them than they had looked outside.

He walked, slowly, into the garden. Nobody made a big deal. Diego's abuela called across the lot for a shovel like it was the most normal Saturday in the world. Jalil's baba came over and shook Mr. Henderson's hand the way one grown-up shakes another grown-up's hand, which is to say seriously and without too many words. Mr. Henderson's grip was stiff at first, and then, slowly, it relaxed.

By noon, there was a small dogwood sapling in the corner of the Lot, its thin branches tied loosely to a stake. In front of it was a ribbon, and on the ribbon, in Mei's best printing, one word.

PATIENCE.

Mr. Henderson stood back from it. He took off the yellow gloves, slow.

"Thank you," he said, to nobody and to everybody.

"Thank you," said Diego, which was maybe not what you were supposed to say, but it was what came out of him, because his abuela had taught him that thanking a person for showing up was the oldest and the most important thank you there was.

Across the lot, Noor was kneeling by her olive tree. She had brought a small bottle of water from her mother's kitchen. She poured it, slowly, around the base of the little tree.

"Welcome, teta," she whispered, in Arabic, to the tree.

The sun moved. The mulberry tree shivered its new green leaves. The wild mint along the fence, which nobody had planted, which had been there long before any of them, let out its bright and ordinary smell into the air.

Jalil stood in the middle of the Lot, muddy to his elbows, watching his friends. Watching Amaya pop out of her too-big hole like a very small angry pumpkin. Watching Mei water her sunflower seeds with a careful hand. Watching Tommy, quiet, smiling to himself, tucking one more mint shoot into the ground. Watching Noor's hand on the olive tree's thin trunk. Watching Mr. Henderson standing by a dogwood with his eyes a little shiny. Watching Mrs. Gable laughing, actually laughing, in a way Jalil had never heard her do.

Seven virtues in one garden.

Seven, and maybe more tomorrow, and maybe more next year, because Mei had been right, from the beginning, without even knowing it. A garden was not a finished thing. A garden was an invitation, with room always for one more.

Jalil closed his eyes. The sun was warm on his face. Somewhere behind him, baby Layli was babbling at a bee, and his baba was laughing, and Diego's abuela was starting to sing in Spanish, and he could not remember ever being more exactly, entirely, absolutely happy.

THE END

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A NOTE FROM CRIMSON ARK PUBLISHING

Dear reader,

Community gardens are real places, and they grow real things, and they grow them best when many different hands plant side by side. If you walk down a street in almost any city in the world, you can find a patch of earth that people have loved into life. Maybe you and your family will build one someday.

The Maple Street Kids plant virtues along with their seeds. A virtue is a good quality, like kindness, or courage, or hope, that grows inside a person when it is watered with practice. Bahá'ís believe that every child is born with the seeds of all the virtues already inside them. The job of a life, and of a community, is to help those seeds grow.

Sometimes, like the Maple Street Kids, you will meet somebody who stands in your way. Mr. Henderson was afraid, and his fear came out as words that hurt. The children did not pretend his words were okay. But they also did not give up on him. They kept showing up. They left a space for him, even before they knew he would come. That is how love often works. It makes room, and then it waits.

If there is somebody in your life who feels like a closed door, try not to push. Try, instead, to keep the door of your own heart open. Sometimes a door opens when you least expect it.

Happy planting.

— Crimson Ark Publishing