The Gas My Neighbor Kept Taking

Saturday morning

I did not expect to see him at my door.

It was a quarter after eight. I was in my kitchen in my socks with a piece of toast, and I heard the knock, three soft raps, the kind a boy gives when he has been standing there a while deciding whether to knock at all.

I opened it. Clint stood on the step in jeans and a flannel shirt, unshaven, with his hands shoved in his pockets and bags under his eyes. He did not have his coffee. He did not have his grin. Behind him on my lawn, as neat as a parade, sat a row of things in the grass: the post-hole digger, three orange extension cords coiled and tied, the hedge trimmer, the come-along, and my ten-foot aluminum ladder, laid flat, with a bow of red ribbon around it that I suspect Terri had put there.

He had cleaned all of it. I could tell. There was not a bit of mud on the digger.

“I wanted to bring these back,” he said. His voice was rough. “Terri found a few more in the garage. There is a bag of your fence staples in there, too. I do not know how I…” He stopped. He started again. “I do not know how that happened.”

“I do,” I said.

He nodded. He looked at his boots.

“I wrote you a check,” he said, and pulled it out of his shirt pocket, folded. “It is for the seven twenty-two. And sixteen cents, I figured the sixteen cents mattered.” He tried a smile, and it died. “I am sorry, Darrell. I am not saying it to get out of anything. I do not even think I understood what it was until I saw all of them looking at me. I just never thought of you as somebody who had anything at stake. I thought of you as a man who had…” He swallowed. “Who had already had his life.”

I said nothing for a time.

He nodded again. He took a long breath. Then, awkwardly, like a boy, he held out his hand. I looked at it for a while.

I shook it. I did not squeeze, and he did not either.

What I did with the check

I did not cash his check for a week. When I did, I took the whole seven hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents, and I added the hundred Terri had pushed into the coffee can, and I drove it to the church. I walked it into Tracy’s office myself.

“This is for the winter heating fund,” I said. “For any widow in town who runs short in January.”

She took it with both hands. Her eyes got wet. “Paula would be pleased.”

“She would have made him a pie,” I said, “and then she would have made him dig her a garden.”

Tracy laughed out loud at that, and so did I, and it was the first time since Paula died that I had laughed in front of another person without feeling I owed somebody an apology.