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They stood in silence for a minute longer, and then Mr. Chen awkwardly cleared his throat. The moment had come to ask whether
she was interested in the apartment, but before he could speak, he saw her pale lips moving slowly. “ ‘And their soul shall
be as a watered garden,’ “ she murmured, “ ‘and they shall not sorrow any more at all.’ “

Mr. Chen flushed but did not say anything.

She turned toward him, gently patting her skirt, which clung to the flowers. “I would like to live here,” she said.

Mr. Chen showed his wife the security deposit check for eight hundred dollars. They had signed the lease that very afternoon,
and the Christian lady would advance the first month’s rent by the end of the week. Mrs. Chen was happy, but she pretended
to find fault with her husband. “You were too hasty,” she said. “Why didn’t you check her references?”

“She looked respectable,” Mr. Chen said. “She works at a travel agency near the apartment.”

“And how did she dress?”

“A suit. Like she was educated.”

Mrs. Chen snorted. “Christians are crazy, smiling at you all the time. Your child dies, and they say you should be happy.”

Mr. Chen sighed, looking out the front window. “She didn’t seem like that.” From the living room, he could see one of the
two cypresses that grew beside their front door. Twelve years ago, when they first moved into their house, the trees had barely
reached Mr. Chen’s hip, but over the years they had grown into dark, thin spires. When their son was diagnosed with cancer,
Mrs. Chen wanted her husband to cut them down. “They’re bad luck,” she said. “They overshadow our house.”

Mr. Chen grew angry at his wife’s suggestion. “Don’t be silly. Chopping down two trees won’t make his sickness go away.”

The tumor steadily advanced until the doctors told the Chens that their son’s only chance at recovery was surgery. The Chens
relented because by this time they were hoping for a miracle. But how stupid they had been, Mrs. Chen wept to her husband.
A person cannot live when his head is sliced open like a watermelon, Western medicine or not. Why had they let the doctors
touch him? He had died on the operating table with no one to comfort him. A terrible death that no one deserves, and he was
only fifteen years old.

Mrs. Chen’s tongue grew more venomous after their son died. When she opened her mouth, it was as if she were spitting out
words to rid herself of life’s bitter taste.

In contrast, Mr. Chen became softer, less defined. He rarely talked now, and the wrinkles on his face deepened so that Mrs.
Chen said his forehead resembled a tic-tac-toe board. Mrs. Chen made her words sharp to wake him up. She didn’t like to see
him wading through the motions of life.

Neither of them mentioned the cypresses, which continued to twist toward the sky. It was as if their mutual silence were a
tacit agreement to let them grow, each willing the bad winds to keep blowing.

In October, Mr. Chen received a four-hundred-dollar check from Marnie Wilson, accompanied by a note of apology. “Not two months
and already she can’t pay,” he muttered, showing the check to his wife. When he called her number, he heard the same toneless
voice recorded on her answering machine.
And God shall wipe away all tears
... Mr. Chen did not wait for the message to end before he hung up the phone.

A week went by with no additional check in the mail. On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Chen decided to let his wife manage the store
without him and he drove to Garden City Apartments. It usually took him forty-five minutes to drive into the city, and he
had come to regard all the driving back and forth as a waste of gas and time. The worst was when people made appointments
to see the apartment but then didn’t show up. He would wait in the lobby, looking up from his newspaper at each person who
came through the revolving doors. When an hour passed, Mr. Chen was forced to fold up his paper and drive back home. It was
on such days that he believed people had no respect for each other.

In the lobby, Mr. Chen asked the doorman whether he knew if Marnie Wilson was in. “If you’ll just wait a second,” the doorman
said, “I’ll call up and see if she’s there.”

“No, no, I go up,” Mr. Chen said. “She go out every morning?”

The doorman shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

Mr. Chen took the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked down the close, dimly lit hallway. The walls were painted the color
of dark moss, and the carpet was confusing for him to look at with its intertwining flowers. He knocked on the apartment door.
“Miss Wilson?” He wondered if she was going to pretend not to be in.

A door opened loudly across the hallway. A large woman in a robe and sneakers peered at him from her doorway. Mr. Chen could
hear her breathing through her mouth. He smiled and nodded, and the woman closed her door without saying anything.

“Miss Wilson?” he said, more softly this time. He put his ear against the door and tried to turn the knob. He hesitated before
taking the key out of his pocket. If she was there, he would apologize, say that he remembered a previous tenant complaining
about a leak.

“Hello,” he called as he opened the door.

It was late afternoon, and a dusty gold light filtered through the windows. Mr. Chen could tell from the hushed stillness
that no one was inside. He was surprised by the apartment’s emptiness. Two chairs, a card table with rusting legs, a small
bookcase with slanting paperbacks. A clock on the wall had stopped at 6:35. For a moment, Mr. Chen panicked, thinking the
Christian lady had left her most worthless possessions behind. But then he noticed a small blue silk rug that changed to a
silvery green when he walked to the other side of the room. It was the only valuable-looking thing in the apartment and at
odds with the rest of her furniture.

Through the window, Mr. Chen could see the parking lot, a few trees, and the eight-lane highway. From twelve stories above,
behind sealed windows, the cars glided soundlessly past.

In the bedroom, Mr. Chen was startled by the mirrors that the Christian lady had hung along the wall, at least a dozen of
them, some as small as the palm of his hand. Oval and rectangular mirrors, mirrors in the shapes of triangles and suns, mirrors
with smooth silver faces and dark blemishes reflecting hardly anything at all. They flickered to life whenever he moved. There
was a single mattress with a wool blanket on the floor. An upturned box that she had decorated with an embroidered handkerchief
and used as a night table for her Bible,lamp, and radio. He pushed open her closet door, saw her few clothes drooping from
their hangers. The shelf above the rack was empty except for an old maroon hat with a wilted black feather. When he took it
off the shelf, the hat was stiff and light in his hands, the velvet marred by dark, oily spots.

On his way out, Mr. Chen saw two sun-faded photographs on the refrigerator door. Two little girls in orange bikinis were standing
in a plastic pool in the front yard of a house. One girl’s mouth was open in a scream of delight, her hands clutching her
hair, her child’s belly exposed to the camera, as the older girl gazed quietly on. In the second photograph, the same two
girls were dressed in bright-striped shirts and bell-bottoms and together held a large squash in their arms. The younger one
squinted in the sun, her lips parted, showing two large front teeth. Mr. Chen thought the older one, the girl who seemed more
distant and self-possessed, was Marnie Wilson.

He let himself out of the apartment, quietly shutting the door behind him.

He found the Christian lady downstairs in the garden. She sat on a bench beside the roses, her head bowed over a book, her
lips moving silently over the words. She wore a plaid gray dress and short black-laced boots. There was a painstaking neatness
in her appearance, which for some reason made Mr. Chen feel sorry for her. Her smooth brown hair was pulled back too tightly,
revealing a high, pale forehead. She looked up at him, and Mr. Chen began to smile, but she hastily glanced down at her book,
her index finger moving rapidly across the page.

“Miss Wilson?”

Her shoulder blades stiffened, and she stared at her book a moment longer before raising her head. Mr. Chen pretended to look
around the garden. “You like this place,” he said.

She shut her book, her fingers still caught between the pages.

“I receive your letter. You say you have a job?”

She gave a slight cough, clearing her throat. “It was only temporary.”

Mr. Chen nodded. “You find another job.” She set her book down on the bench without saying anything. “Why don’t you ask help
from parents? Your parents can help, right?”

She looked down at her lap, studying her hands as if they didn’t belong to her. Then, in a calm voice, she told Mr. Chen that
her parents were dead. With one hand, she smoothed the creases in her dress.

Mr. Chen was silent. He felt a curious lightness take over his body, as if he were watching proceedings from far away. For
the first time, he wondered if the Christian lady was a liar. “Oh, too bad,” he finally said. He was too embarrassed to bring
up the subject of money now.

She looked at him, smiling faintly. “I will give you the money as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” Mr. Chen mumbled, turning away. “Thank you.”

On the way home, Mr. Chen found himself stuck in traffic, amid a procession of alien, glittering cars. The image of the Christian
lady sitting in the garden with her eyes half-closed and her lips moving seemed unreal to him, a fragment of a dream. A car
honked, and Mr. Chen realized that the cars ahead of his had begun to move. He pushed the gas too hard, and the engine roared
to life as his car leapt forward.

When he came home, he found his wife on the bed propped up against her pillows. She was wearing cotton pajamas, the seat of
her pants marred by faint circles of blood. She had scrubbed them again and again until they were only terra-cotta outlines.
“Do you know what day this is?” she asked him.

Mr. Chen looked at her blankly.

“Today is our anniversary,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, looking at him carefully. “I’m not surprised that you should
forget. There isn’t anything happy to remember about this day. Do you remember we spent two hundred dollars for the reception?
Ha! That was a lot of money to us then.”

“It still is a lot of money,” he said.

“You always were stingy in your heart,” she said. “That woman can’t pay a few hundred dollars, and you go sniffing for it
like a dog.”

“What do you want?” Mr. Chen muttered. “You complain if I go, and you complain if I don’t.”

“That’s because you make me sick,” she said. “Do you hear that? Nothing you do will make me happy.” She began to cry and wiped
her tears away with the back of her hand. She got off the bed and went into the bathroom, slamming the door. Mr. Chen heard
a sound of something smashing. He was silent for a moment. “Mingli,” he said. He knocked on the door. He could hear his wife
sobbing. “Open the door.”

“Go away,” she cried.

Mr. Chen went back to their bedroom. He sat down on the edge of their bed in a stupor. In a few minutes, he heard her opening
the door. “Do you know what I regret the most?” she said. Her face was a terrible sight. He could stand any viciousness from
his wife, but he couldn’t stand her tears. They made him deeply afraid.

“I don’t want to hear,” he said.

“Do you remember that time when he cried outside our door? He was four years old and he cried outside our door wanting to
sleep with us. We didn’t let him in because we didn’t want to spoil him. He cried for an hour maybe, and we listened to him
for all that time, and when he was quiet, we thought he had gone back to bed. But in the morning, we found him lying outside
our door, his forehead burning with fever. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Mr. Chen said.

Mrs. Chen got into bed, turning her back away from him. “That memory makes me feel bad,” she said. “I can’t ever forget it.
It’s what I regret the most.” She reached over and turned off her light.

Mr. Chen received a call from the apartment management. People in the building were beginning to wonder about the woman who
sat all day in the conservatory. “They thought at first she didn’t live here, that she came off the streets,” the office manager
told Mr. Chen. “A resident saw her distributing pamphlets under people’s doors.” The manager laughed uncomfortably.

Mr. Chen grunted.

“Believe me, we don’t have anything against your tenant. But I thought you should know about her behavior. Maybe you could
talk to her?”

“Me? What can I do? She hasn’t paid rent for two months.” The week before, the Christian lady had sent Mr. Chen a check for
three hundred dollars along with a handwritten note.
Once I win my case with the government, I will be able to pay you the money I owe
.

“Is that so?” The manager sounded pleasantly surprised, then immediately lowered his voice. “You are the landlord, after all.”

Mr. Chen sighed as he hung up the phone. He dug around in the closet for his typewriter, which he used for official business
only, and poking at the keys with two fingers he fashioned a reply to the Christian lady.
I hear no more excuses. I come on Monday to speak to you
.

On Monday evening, he drove to Garden City Apartments, wondering whether she would be in. The weatherman had predicted a storm,
and the air had turned breezy and cold. Mr. Chen gripped the steering wheel whenever he felt the wind nudging his car into
the other lane. The sky was dark and clear, without a hint of rain.

In the apartment building, he was surprised to find the Christian lady’s door half-open. He glimpsed through the crack and
saw her kneeling on the floor. At first, he thought she was patting an animal, but then he saw that she was straightening
the fringe of her rug. He knocked on the door, and she told him to come in. She stood up, slowly wiping her hands against
her skirt. She wore a blouse with tiny red flowers embroidered around the collar.