The Street That Watered at Six
He was not ready for that. A man braced for a shove will fall over if you step aside.
“Then what is all this for?”
I thought about how to say it.
“My dad watered this yard by hand for thirty years, Carl, right where I’ve been standing. I quit doing it when he died because I didn’t want to be out here without him. You took a golf club to the reason I quit.” I shrugged. “Turns out I like it. Turns out a lot of people do. Come on out some morning. Nancy makes the coffee strong.”
He looked at me like I had spoken to him in Portuguese.
“You people,” he said. Not loud. Cold, the way he said everything. “You’ve all lived on this one street your whole lives, and you think that makes it the world.”
He walked back across his lawn. He went around the long way, I noticed, so he did not have to step over the capped risers.
Nancy was in the hall behind me.
“I heard,” she said. “Is this mean, Dave? What we’re doing. I’ve been asking myself.”
I had been asking myself too. I told her so. I told her I had lain awake on it two nights running.
“If I thought it was to hurt him, I’d quit tomorrow,” I said. “But I keep coming back to it. All anybody’s doing is standing in their own yard being pleasant. If that’s hard on him, the hard part isn’t coming from us.”
“Give it till the end of the week,” Nancy said. “Then we go knock on that door together and just talk to them. No hoses.”
I said that was fair.
We did not need the end of the week.
It was the Thursday. I remember because the trash cans were out.
Six o’clock, a little wind, the sky that washed-out white it gets here before a hot day. I had the hose going on the strip by the pin. Mrs. Lang was at the curb with her can. Bob and Joyce were out, Gary, Jim. Kim’s car was just pulling in from the hospital.
And at 6:02, the Jessups’ front door opened.
Not the garage. The front door, which was forty minutes early and the wrong door.
It was Linda.
She had on a yellow robe, zipped to the neck, and white canvas shoes, and her hair was not done. I had never seen her hair not done. She stood on the porch between the two wicker chairs with the plastic on them, and she looked at all of us, the whole length of the street.
Everybody stopped talking. Bob quit in the middle of a sentence about the Royals.
Linda came down the steps. She went around the side of her house, and we heard a spigot squeak, and she came back dragging a hose. A brand new one. It still had the cardboard sleeve from the store around one end, and she pulled that off and folded it and put it in her robe pocket, because she is that kind of woman.
She dragged that hose across the best lawn on Meadowlark Lane, all the way to the property line, and she stopped about fourteen inches on her side of my father’s pin.
She squeezed the nozzle. She watered her own grass.
Her hand was shaking so hard the stream wobbled.
Nobody moved. I had a full cup of coffee and I could not have told you which hand it was in.