The Street That Watered at Six

“Dave. Get up. Come look at this.”

“Is it raining?”

“No. Come look.”

I went to the laundry room window in my shorts.

Carl Jessup was on his knees in my yard.

He had on old jeans and a gray undershirt, and there was a sack from the Ace Hardware on Main beside him, and a little hand trowel, and a roll of that white thread tape. He had the cap off the first riser. He was trying to seat a new head on it, and he had it cross-threaded, and I could see from thirty feet that he knew something was wrong and did not know what.

Nancy said, “Are you going out there?”

“In a minute.”

“What are you waiting on?”

“I want him to get one of them on by himself.”

It took him four tries. When it finally spun down straight, he sat back on his heels and looked at it like he had landed a fish.

I put on Dad’s robe. I poured two cups.

He heard the screen door and did not look up. I walked down the line and held one of the cups out over his shoulder, and after a second he took it.

A man hands you something, you take it.

“These are the wrong ones,” he said. His voice was rough. “They didn’t have the kind you had. The fellow said these were better. They’ve got a screw on top. He said you can set how far it throws.”

“He’s right. Those are better than what I had.”

He drank some of the coffee. He made a face.

“She does make it strong.”

“I told you.”

“I grew up in apartments,” Carl said. He was looking at the trowel. “Eleven of them by the time I was eighteen. You didn’t learn the neighbors. You kept your things nice because your things came with you.”

“That car is the first thing I ever bought new that I didn’t need. I’m sixty-one years old.” He shook his head. “I came out that Saturday and saw the spots, and I don’t know what happened. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I stood in my garage afterward and my hands were going like this.”

He held one out flat. It was steady now.

“And then you said thank you.”

“I did.”

“I’d have known what to do if you hit me.”

“I know it.”

“I didn’t know what to do with any of it. The robe. The waving. That old woman.” He almost smiled, and then it went away. “Linda cried Thursday night. Not about me. About the bird feeders. She said, ‘I let you do that to her and I never said a word.’ Thirty-six years, and I never heard her talk to me the way she talked in that driveway.”

“She did all right.”

“She did better than all right.”

He set the cup down in the grass, carefully, and picked up the second head.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. He did not mean the sprinkler.

“You’re doing it.” I got down on one knee beside him. My back let me know about it. “Wrap the tape the other way. Clockwise. Otherwise it bunches when you thread it. There. Now that one’s going to be a quarter turn too tight, back it off.”

We did the six of them together. It took an hour, because I made him do the work and only talked.

When the last one was on, I walked to the garage and opened the valve and ran the zone.