The ladies came off their porches.
I didn’t expect that. I thought they’d stay inside in their air conditioning, peeking out the curtains. But they came out one by one. Slowly. With canes and walkers and folding chairs.
Mrs. Dorothy Banks came out first, with a plate of oatmeal cookies wrapped in plastic. Then Mrs. Margaret Halloway, who’s eighty-six and still drives a 1994 Buick to the Piggly Wiggly every Tuesday. Then Mrs. Irene Kessler, who’s ninety-five, wheeled out to the end of her driveway by her great-granddaughter.
Then Mr. Archie Coleman, with his white cane, tapping his way down his front steps.
“Where’s that Marine?” he hollered. “I want to shake his hand. I can’t see him, but I want to shake it.”
By the fifth yard, they’d set up folding chairs in a little row under the big oak tree in Mrs. Banks’s front yard. All of them. Like they were at a parade.
Loretta kept the tea coming. Mrs. Banks kept the cookies coming. Every time I came to the end of a row near the oak tree, someone handed me something. A cookie. A cold washcloth for the back of my neck. A slice of watermelon.
And they talked.
They talked to each other, mostly, but loud enough for me to hear over the mower. They talked about their husbands.
“Clarence would’ve had this yard done by seven a.m.,” Mrs. Halloway said. “He used to wake up the whole street with that old Toro.”
“Herbert used to edge with a pair of scissors,” Miss Edna said. “On his hands and knees. I thought he was crazy.”
“Walt Gaines had the prettiest yard in Cedar Ridge,” Mrs. Banks said. “Three years running.”
“Four,” Grandma said from her porch next door. “Nineteen eighty-eight. They gave it to the Hendersons because they felt sorry for them. Walt never got over it.”
All the ladies laughed.
Then they talked about my dad.
“Danny used to mow my yard when he was twelve,” Mrs. Kessler said, in her thin, papery voice. “Charged me two dollars. And then he’d spend it at the drugstore on a Coke and a candy bar and come back and give me half the candy bar.”
“He was a good boy,” Mrs. Banks said.
“He was a good man,” Miss Edna said.
“You look just like him, Hunter,” Mrs. Halloway called out. “Out there in your little shorts. Just like him.”
I had to turn away and pretend there was something wrong with the mower for a minute.
Grandma never left her chair.
She sat in that broken lawn chair at the top of her porch steps all morning. She didn’t come down to the oak tree with the other ladies. She didn’t call out. She just sat there with her hands folded in her lap.
She watched me the whole morning.
Every time I made a turn at the end of a row, I looked up, and she was looking at me. Every yard. Every row. Straight lines, dark and light, all the way down Locust Street.
Around the seventh yard, a skinny kid on a bike rode up. Maybe fifteen. Long hair, Cardinals hat on backward, a phone sticking out of his back pocket. He stopped at the curb and watched me for a while.
When I shut off the mower to empty the bag, he came over.
“You’re doing Mrs. Banks’s?” he said.
“Yep.”
“I used to do Mrs. Banks’s.” He kicked at the curb. “And your grandma’s. And Miss Edna’s. For a couple months.”
I stopped.
“You did?”
“Yeah. For Ray.” He shrugged. “He paid me twenty-five bucks a yard. I did them on Saturdays with his mower. Well, your grandpa’s mower. He’d drop it off and pick it up.” He looked at the Snapper. “That thing was so dull I was basically beating the grass to death.”
“Twenty-five dollars a yard,” I repeated.
“Yeah. Ray said he had the contracts and I was just the labor. Like a subcontractor.” The kid scratched his neck. “Then he stopped paying me in May. Said the ladies weren’t paying him. So I quit.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tyler. Tyler Simms.”
“Simms. Loretta’s grandson?”
“Yeah.” He looked over at his grandmother, who was pouring tea for Mr. Archie. “She’s been on Ray about it for months. He told her to mind her own business.”
I looked at Tyler. Fifteen years old. Doing the work. Getting paid twenty-five dollars a yard, and then not getting paid at all.
And Ray collecting four hundred from my grandmother. For a yard he never even mowed.
“Tyler,” I said. “You busy right now?”
“Not really.”
“There’s a rake in my grandpa’s shed. On the pegboard, on the left side. Outlined in black marker.” I pointed. “Go get it and rake up behind me. I’ll pay you twenty-five a yard.”
“You said you’re not charging anybody.”
“I’m not charging them,” I said. “I’m paying you. Different thing.”
He grinned. He dropped his bike in the grass and ran for the shed.
Chapter Seven: Raymond
Around one o’clock, a truck slowed down at the end of Locust Street.
I heard it before I saw it. A deep, rattling diesel growl, the kind that makes your chest vibrate. Then it turned the corner.
Ray’s truck. A big white Ram 3500 Cummins with a lift kit and chrome running boards and tires that cost more than my first car. It was shined up so clean the sun bounced off the hood and hit me in the eyes from half a block away.
I knew that truck. Grandma had written me about it in October. Your uncle got himself a new truck. Real big. He drove it to church and parked it across two spaces and the pastor had to say something.
I shut off the mower.
He rolled down Locust Street slowly, at about five miles an hour, like he was in a parade. I watched his head turn from side to side. Looking at the yards.
Every yard on that street had stripes now. Dark and light. Straight as fence wire. The clippings raked into neat piles by the curb, thanks to Tyler. Mrs. Banks’s roses edged. Mr. Archie’s front walk swept.
The ladies under the oak tree had gone quiet. All of them. Mrs. Halloway had her hand on her chest. Miss Edna had set down her tea.
Ray pulled up to the curb right in front of me. He rolled down the window. Cold air from his AC hit me in the face. Country music was playing inside.
Raymond Gaines was fifty-one years old. He had my grandpa’s build, big and heavy through the shoulders, and my grandpa’s nose. But he didn’t have Grandpa’s face. Grandpa’s face was square and plain and still. Ray’s face always moved. He smiled a lot. He talked a lot. He used to slap my dad on the back so hard it left a red mark.
He looked at me in my wet PT shorts. Then he looked up and down the street. Then back at me.
“Well, look who’s home,” he said. “The war hero.”
“Hey, Uncle Ray.”
“You cut the whole street?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at the yards again. I watched his eyes count.
“Who’s paying you for all this?” he asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
He looked at me. His smile stayed on his face, but something behind it went still.
“Nobody,” he repeated.
“Nobody,” I said. “I’m not charging anybody, Uncle Ray. It’s just grass.”
He did the math. I watched him do it. I watched it cross his face like a cloud over a field.
Ten yards. Mowed. For free. By his nephew in uniform shorts, in front of every widow on the street.
Nobody on Locust Street was ever going to pay him two hundred dollars a month to cut grass again.
The grin went off his face.
“Now hold on,” he said. His voice changed. It got loud. Friendly-loud, like a salesman. “Hold on a minute here, Hunter. You don’t know the whole story. You’ve been gone a year.”
“I’ve been gone eleven months.”
“These ladies asked me to do this,” he said. He leaned out the window, talking loud so the whole oak tree could hear. “They came to me. I was doing them a favor. Your grandma too. She offered.”
“She offered to pay you four hundred dollars a month.”
“She offered,” Ray said. “I didn’t ask for it. She wanted to help me out. Ask her yourself.”
That’s when Grandma’s voice came from the porch.
“Raymond.”
It wasn’t loud. She didn’t yell. Opal Gaines has never yelled one time in my whole life.
But it carried. It went right down Locust Street, over the cut grass, over the cicadas, into the open window of that shined-up truck.
“Raymond,” she called.
Leave a Reply