“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.”
