“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.
