One afternoon of bright spring light, I sat with my mother on her patio while she took a break from gardening. Since my oldest shortened Gaga to Gog, we’d never called my mother anything else.

Gog and I sipped sweating glasses of sun tea, facing her tilled garden on the slope, welcoming the vegetable seeds. The stench of the fertilizer threaded the air and irritated my nostrils. A trowel and a weeding fork leaned against a white pail. Emptied seed packets of beans, broccoli, cucumbers, and peas scattered Gog’s small yard.

Recently, my stepdad had died from lung cancer. Despite my daughter Valerie driving her ninety-minute commute to work as a residential counselor for teenage boys, she insisted on living at Gog’s home since graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

“Gog shouldn’t be there alone,” Valerie had said.

Gog leaned back in her matching chair and wiped splattered mud off her hand and onto her apron. “What’s a favorite of Valerie’s?” She elaborated that she wanted to surprise her.

Perhaps Gog was trying to make up for an argument that had come between them. Gog didn’t like how Valerie began staying out until the early morning hours with none of her known friends or people we had ever met.

“She’s doing what young adults do,” I told Gog. “There’s no harm in Valerie exploring new friendships.”

“At 3 a.m.?” Gog crossed her arms.

I turned my gaze to a hummingbird fluttering around the red glass bulb of sweet-sugar water hanging at the end of a black pole Gog made sure to keep full.

“Valerie loves radishes.” I imagined Valerie weeks from now grinning, pulling up the harvest Gog would plant. Standing beside the blooming row of radishes, she would shake off the dirt and bite into a fresh red radish, closing her eyes in delight.

Gog scrunched her nose. “Never grown those before.”

I went on, as I often did, offering Gog a mini-lecture about the cherry-belle radishes, how Valerie and I popped the rose-pink spherical Raphanus Sativus into our mouths for a snack year-round during Valerie’s childhood. After I traveled with her older sister, I promised Valerie once she finished college, I’d go to Paris with her, too, where the French relished raw radishes in the morning with sea salt and sweet butter.

Gog placed her glass down. “You and those French.”

Deep-green leaves poked from Gog’s garden six weeks later, signaling ripened radishes.

By then, Valerie had inhaled a fatal dose of heroin.

Those ripened radishes remained buried in the ground, rotting. Yet, whenever I see radishes for sale, I make sure to buy them.