“Herbert would’ve liked that,” she said quietly.
Chapter Five: Sweet Tea
Word travels faster than a mower.
That’s true anywhere, but it’s especially true on a dead-end street in a small Missouri town on a Saturday morning in July. By the time I finished Miss Edna’s backyard, I could see curtains moving in the windows up and down Locust Street. A screen door creaked open across the road. Then another one.
A woman came across the street toward me, carrying a big plastic pitcher with ice clinking in it.
She was younger than the others. Maybe sixty. She had short gray hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head, and she was wearing scrubs with little cartoon cats on them. I recognized her after a second. Loretta Simms. She was a nurse at the county clinic. She’d given me my shots for kindergarten.
“You look like you need this,” she said, and poured me a big plastic cup of sweet tea.
I drank the whole thing in one go. It was so sweet it made my teeth hurt. It was the best thing I’d tasted in a year.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Don’t thank me,” Loretta said. She poured me another one. “Thank your grandma. She’s the one who called me.”
I looked over at Grandma’s porch. She was still sitting in her lawn chair. She raised one hand at me. Just a little.
“She called you?”
“Said her grandson was home from the Marines and was out cutting grass and might need something cold.” Loretta looked down the street. “She didn’t say you were going to do Edna’s too.”
She was quiet for a second. Then she lowered her voice.
“He charged these old women,” she said. “Your uncle. Did you know that?”
“I’m starting to,” I said.
“He went door to door in April. Told them the city was cracking down on tall grass. Told them they’d get fined fifty dollars a day if they didn’t keep it cut. Then he offered to do it for them.” She shook her head. “Two hundred. Two-fifty. Three hundred for Mrs. Banks, because her yard’s bigger.”
“Is that true? About the city?”
“There’s an ordinance,” Loretta said. “Grass over twelve inches. But they send you a letter first and give you ten days. Nobody gets fined fifty dollars a day. I called city hall myself.”
“Did you tell them that? The ladies?”
“I told some of them.” She sighed. “But he’s Opal’s boy. And he was polite about it, at first. And they’re scared, Hunter. Most of them are living on a few hundred dollars more than your grandma. One letter from the city and they think they’re going to lose their houses.”
I looked down Locust Street. At all those shaggy yards. At the curtains moving in the windows.
“Half of them paid him a month or two and then couldn’t anymore,” Loretta said. “So he stopped coming. And their yards went to seed. And now they’re all scared the city’s going to come after them.” She looked at me. “Which is why every one of them is peeking out their window at you right now.”
I drank my second cup of tea. I set the plastic cup on Miss Edna’s porch rail.
Then Loretta asked me the question.
“You gonna do the whole street?”
I looked at all those shaggy yards. Nine houses. Ten counting Grandma’s. A widow in most of them. Seeds blowing off the tops of the grass in the hot wind.
I thought about the checkbook. Ray. 400. Ray. 400.
I thought about Miss Edna saying, I can’t pay you much, honey.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I believe I am.”
Loretta grinned. “Well, all right then.”
She turned around and walked straight up the middle of Locust Street with her pitcher of tea, calling out in her clinic voice, loud enough to wake the dead.
“Dorothy! Margaret! Irene! Archie! Get on out here. Opal’s grandson’s cutting the whole street, and it’s free, and he needs tea.”
Chapter Six: Ten Yards
Ten yards in a Missouri July.
If you’ve never been in Missouri in July, I can’t explain it to you. The air is so thick and wet it’s like breathing through a hot towel. By ten in the morning it was ninety-one degrees. By noon it was ninety-six. The cicadas in the oak trees were so loud they drowned out the mower.
I’d been in a desert overseas. Real desert, a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade. And I’m telling you, Missouri in July is worse. At least the desert’s dry.
By the third yard, my tan shirt was so soaked it was dark brown. I took it off, wrung it out over the curb like a dishrag, and put it back on wet. It felt good for about four minutes.
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.
And a grown man in a shined truck turned his head like he was nine years old and had tracked mud on her kitchen floor.
He looked up at the porch.
Grandma was standing up. I hadn’t seen her stand up all day. She was standing at the top of her porch steps in her blue housecoat, holding onto the railing with one hand.
“Turn that truck off,” she said. “And come up here.”
Ray looked at me. Then at the ladies under the oak tree. Then back at his mother.
Then he turned off the truck.
Chapter Eight: What Grandma Said
The silence was enormous.
When a Cummins diesel shuts off, it’s like the whole world stops vibrating at once. Even the cicadas seemed to go quiet. The country music cut off in the middle of a line.
Ray opened his door and climbed down off his chrome running board. He was wearing jeans and a Bass Pro Shops polo shirt and sunglasses on a cord around his neck. He walked across Grandma’s front yard, across my fresh stripes, and stopped at the bottom of her porch steps.
He didn’t go up. He stood at the bottom, looking up at her.
I followed him. I stopped at the edge of the grass, a few feet behind him.
“Mama,” Ray said. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you…”
“He hasn’t told me a thing,” Grandma said. “He’s been cutting grass.”
“Then what’s all this about?”
Grandma looked at him for a long time. She held onto the railing.
“I raised two boys in this house,” she said. “Your daddy and I. Two boys.”
“I know, Mama.”
“Danny used to mow Irene Kessler’s yard for two dollars. And then he’d come back and give her half of his candy bar.” She looked down the street at Mrs. Kessler, sitting in her wheelchair at the end of her driveway. “You remember that?”
Ray didn’t answer.
“You used to mow too,” Grandma said. “You remember? You did the Pruitts’ yard. And the Bankses’. Herbert paid you a dollar fifty, and you’d buy baseball cards at the Rexall.”
“Mama…”
“Your daddy taught you both. Right out there. In straight lines.” She pointed at my stripes. “He used to say, a man who cuts a crooked line will tell a crooked story. You remember him saying that?”
Ray’s face had gone red. Not angry red. The other kind.
“I remember,” he said quietly.
“I’ve paid you four hundred dollars every month for eleven months,” Grandma said.
“You offered.”
“I did,” she said. “I did offer. You came to me last August and said Sheila was after you. Said you were behind on the truck. Said you’d see to my yard if I could help you out. And I said yes.”
She paused.
“I said yes because you’re my son,” she said. “And I’ve buried one son. And I’d rather go without than watch you struggle. That’s the truth.”
Behind me, I heard one of the ladies under the oak tree make a small sound.
“But you never once cut my grass, Raymond,” Grandma said.
Ray flinched.
“Tyler Simms cut it,” Grandma said. “Loretta’s grandson. Fifteen years old. On a Saturday morning, with your daddy’s mower, that you never once changed the oil in. I watched him through the window. Every time. You think I didn’t see that?”
She looked past Ray. At the skinny kid in the backward Cardinals hat, standing by the curb with Grandpa’s rake.
“And you stopped paying that boy in May,” she said. “Loretta told me.”
Ray turned around and looked at Tyler. Tyler looked at the ground.
“And then,” Grandma said, and her voice went very quiet, “you went to Edna.”
Ray turned back around.
“You went to Edna Pruitt,” Grandma said. “Who taught you to read. Who stayed after school with you every day in third grade because you couldn’t sound out your words, and never charged your daddy one cent for it.”
Miss Edna, under the oak tree, put her hand over her mouth.
“And you went to Dorothy. And Margaret. And Irene. And you told them the city was going to fine them fifty dollars a day. Women who brought casseroles to this house for a month after your brother died.”
She held onto the railing with both hands now.
“I could stand you taking from me,” she said. “I’m your mother. That’s my business. But you went to them, Raymond.”
Ray didn’t say anything.
He stood at the bottom of those porch steps in his Bass Pro shirt with his head down. His big shoulders were curled in. He looked smaller than I’d ever seen him.
For a long time, nobody said anything.
Then Ray spoke. To the porch steps.
“I lost my job, Mama.”
Grandma went very still.
“In August,” Ray said. “At the plant. They closed the line I was on. Laid off forty of us.” He took a ragged breath. “I didn’t tell Sheila. I didn’t tell anybody. I’d get up every morning and put on my work boots and drive around all day, and come home at five.”
“Raymond.”
“I had the truck payment,” he said. “Eleven hundred a month. And the house. And Sheila’s car. And I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t.” His voice broke. “Danny would’ve known what to do. Danny always knew what to do. And I’m just… I’m the one who’s left.”
He finally looked up at his mother. His eyes were wet.
“So I came to you,” he said. “Because you always said yes. You always said yes to me.”
Chapter Nine: The County Collector
Nobody on Locust Street said anything after that.
Grandma came down the porch steps. Slowly. One at a time, holding onto the railing. Ray put out his hand to help her and she took it.
When she got to the bottom, she was standing in front of her son, who was a foot and a half taller than her. She reached up and put her hand on his face.
“You should have told me,” she said.
“I was ashamed.”
“I know you were.” She patted his cheek. “But being ashamed is not a reason to steal from widows, Raymond.”
She turned around and looked at the oak tree. At all the ladies in their folding chairs.
