Miss Edna stood up from her chair and came to the edge of her porch. She looked at her yard for a long time. She put one hand on the railing.
“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?”
