The Debt Gordon Left Sara’s Son

The First Saturday

It was the end of May, hot early for our part of the state, and Greg was eating cereal at the counter when he looked out the kitchen window at Gordon’s yard and just said it, plain as anything: “Somebody ought to do something about that.”

I told him it wasn’t ours to fix. He didn’t argue with me. He just finished his cereal, put the bowl in the sink, and went out to the shed for our push mower.

I watched from the window while he crossed the road, and I will admit I half expected Gordon to come out and run him off. Instead the old man came out onto the porch in his undershirt, arms crossed, and watched my son cut a stranger’s grass without saying one word to stop him. When Greg finished forty five minutes later, sweating through his t shirt, Gordon still hadn’t moved from that spot on the porch.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Gordon finally said.

“I know,” Greg said, and pushed the mower back across the road.

That was the whole conversation. I did not think there would be a second Saturday. I was wrong about that, the same way I turned out to be wrong about a great many things concerning that man and my son.