The Street That Watered at Six
“I’m trying to make grass.”
“Because if this is some kind of a,” and he waved the golf shoes around, hunting the word, “a demonstration.”
“Carl, I’m a man in a bathrobe with a hose.” I smiled at him, and I made sure it was a real one. “Hit them straight this morning.”
He stood there another few seconds. Then he walked to the Cadillac, and I will tell you he checked the hood before he got in. Ran two fingers down it. Bone dry.
He backed out. He did not wave.
I waved for both of us.
That was the first week.
Monday, he came out in a tie and said nothing. Tuesday, he said, “You can’t stand there.” I told him about the pin. I offered to show him where to press his heel. He declined.
Friday, I found the invoice.
It was in my mailbox. Folded in thirds. No stamp.
It was typed on his company’s letterhead, and it was an estimate from a detail shop out on East Fourth for what they called paint correction. Water spot removal, clay bar, polish, sealant. Two hundred and forty dollars.
Across the bottom, in Carl’s own hand, in blue ink: Damage from your irrigation, May through July. I have let you know.
Nancy read it at the kitchen table with her glasses down on her nose.
“Oh, I will let him know something,” she said.
“Hand me the checkbook.”
“You are not.”
“I am.”
“David. He destroyed our property and he is billing us.”
“He’s right about the spots.” I uncapped the pen. “That’s the thing, Nan. He’s right about that one piece of it. He did tell me in May. He said it over the roof of the car while I was carrying in groceries, and I said I’d look at it, and I turned the arc on one head and forgot the other five. Hutchinson water will spot a car. Everybody here knows that.”
“That does not give him the right.”
“No, it doesn’t. But I’m not going to stand out there every morning being the wronged party if I owe the man two hundred and forty dollars.”
She watched me write it. Her mouth was a straight line.
“You’re either the best man I know,” she said, “or the most aggravating.”
“Dad was both.”
I walked it over that evening. I had not been up that front walk since the cinnamon rolls. Carl’s office car was gone, and it was Linda Jessup who opened the door.
She is a small, tidy woman, about our age, with reading glasses on a chain. In two years I had heard her say maybe forty words, and thirty of them were thank you. She opened the door about a foot.
“Evening, Linda. This is for Carl. For the car.”
She looked at the check. She looked at the amount. Then she looked past me, at my yard, at the six capped risers along the line where I had screwed plugs in so I could run the other two zones.
Her face did something I was not ready for. It went red, slowly, from the collar up, the way a kid’s does when the teacher reads the note out loud.
“He sent you a bill,” she said.
“He did.”
“After.” She did not finish that. She closed her hand around the check. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d.”
“It’s all right.”
“It is not all right,” Linda Jessup said, very quietly, and then she thanked me and shut the door.