I went still.
“My uncle,” I said.
“Raymond.” She nodded. “He came around in the spring. Said he was doing your grandma’s yard and he’d do mine too. Said I couldn’t keep letting it go, the city would send me a letter.” She shook her head. “Two hundred dollars a month, he wanted. For a yard this size.”
“Did you pay it?”
“Two months,” she said. “April and May. Then I had to tell him no. My pills went up. My insurance changed in January. I just couldn’t.” She looked down at her hands. “He wasn’t very nice about it. He said I’d be sorry when the city fined me.”
Ray had been to her too.
I stood there in her driveway in my PT shorts with the sweat drying on my back, and something went cold in my chest. The same cold I’d felt sometimes overseas, right before things went bad.
Two hundred dollars. From a retired schoolteacher who gave out butterscotch candies.
“I’m not charging anybody today, ma’am,” I said.
She looked at me for a long time over her glasses.
“You were always a sweet boy,” she said finally. “Even when you couldn’t spell ‘necessary.’”
“I still can’t, ma’am.”
She laughed. Then she picked up her bowl of beans and started snapping again.
“Go on, then,” she said. “And watch my roses along the fence. Herbert planted those in 1972.”
I cut her grass. I went slow along the fence line so I wouldn’t nick Herbert’s roses. I raked up the worst of the clippings into a pile by the curb, so they wouldn’t smother the lawn.
When I was done, her yard had stripes too. Dark and light.
