Danny was sitting on the curb behind his house when I saw him. He was fifty-four, wearing a worn-out work shirt that had once been blue and was now the color of old dishwater. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at the empty space where his wife's garden used to be.

Danny Kowalski. Polish name, Ohio town, no one remembers the name. He lost his job three months ago at the steel plant outside Youngstown. Now he makes a few dollars a week picking wild herbs for his neighbors—peppermint, yarrow, elderflower. Enough for bread. Not enough for anything else.

His daughter-in-law took his son and moved to Columbus. Danny has a ten-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, who stays with him when his daughter-in-law is working. Sometimes she stays all week. Sometimes she stays a weekend. Danny doesn't mind. He likes having someone in the house. The house is big for one person and small for two.

Marie showed up on a Tuesday. Danny was picking mint behind the woods when he saw her sitting on the side of the road, legs stretched out, shoes untied, a cut on her knee that was oozing. She was forty-something if he had to guess, maybe older, maybe younger. Her hair was pulled back in a knot that had come loose somewhere around her ears. She smelled like cheap perfume and something herbal.

"I'm lost," she said. "My family died in a car crash. I don't have any money for a bus."

Danny looked at her for a long time. He looked at the road, the woods, the sky. He looked back at her.

"Come on," he said.

He took her home. It was a two-bedroom mobile home on the edge of town, with a porch that sagged and a kitchen that smelled like boiled cabbage. He gave her some iodine and a bandage from the cabinet and made her a cup of tea.

She stayed. Two weeks, maybe three. She didn't talk much. She helped around the house—folded laundry, swept the floor, made soup from things she found in Danny's cupboard. She showed him how to make a pain tea from willow bark. He gave some to old Tom Miller next door, and Tom said it worked.

Marie taught him things he had never learned in school. How to use a certain root to break a fever. How to mix mint and honey for a cough. How to prepare a poultice from plantain leaves for insect bites. He used these things on his neighbors. Word spread, slowly. A few people started paying him a few dollars. Not enough for much. Enough for bread.

One Tuesday morning, she was gone. Danny found fifty dollars on the kitchen counter and an old notebook with handwritten recipes. No note. No explanation. Nobody knew her name except Danny, and he wasn't sure that was even her real name.

A year passed. Sophie got pneumonia. Bad pneumonia. The small-town doctor couldn't handle it. Told Danny to take her to Columbus. Dr. Richard Patel at the private clinic on the outskirts of town was straightforward.

"It will cost tens of thousands," he said. "And we might not save her."

Danny didn't have tens of thousands. He had a few hundred dollars and a mobile home that was worth less than his car.

Sophie's breathing got worse. She couldn't catch her breath. Her lips turned purple. Danny sat beside her bed and held her hand and watched her struggle to breathe and felt something inside him go completely hollow.

Then Marie came back. She walked into the house without knocking, like she had never left. She said she had a cousin in New Orleans who was a nurse, and the cousin could get an experimental antibiotic. She made a phone call. Two days later, the medicine arrived.

Sophie got better.

But Danny had to sell the land behind his house to a developer. The land where his wife had planted flowers the year before she died. The land where Sophie had learned to dig for worms and catch fireflies. The developer was building a storage center. Danny got a few thousand dollars for it. Not enough for Columbus. Not enough for anything. Just enough to keep breathing.

Sophie went to Columbus for treatment. She said she didn't want to come back. Marie disappeared. Nobody asked Danny if he had seen Marie since. Nobody cared.

Danny sat on the empty patch of grass behind his house and smoked a cigarette. The wind blew across the bare earth, lifting bits of dried grass and carrying them away. He crushed the cigarette under his shoe, stood up, and walked back into the mobile home.

That was it.