The Soup I Carried Next Door
“Let me get it said, Dale. I’ve practiced it enough.” He cleared his throat. “That surveyor’s stake went in four feet on our side of the hedge, right in her mother’s peonies. I came home from the elevator and saw it and I pulled it out of the ground and pitched it into your yard. Then I told you across the hedge you’d had your eye on that strip since 1969.”
“You did say that.”
“It was a fool thing and I knew it was a fool thing with my mouth still open. You said you hadn’t drawn the line, the county had, and that was the Lord’s truth. And I went in the house and told Verna you meant to take her mother’s flowers.” He shook his head. “That was what she carried up those church steps. My version. She said a hard thing, but I loaded the gun.”
Verna had put her hand over her mouth.
“And then that fall you poured your garage slab,” Lloyd said. “One stall. On the far side of your lot. I stood at the bedroom window and watched the truck. A man who wants four feet of his neighbor’s yard does not build his garage clear on the other side of his own. I knew that day what you were telling me. I knew you’d given it up without a word, so she could keep her peonies.”
“Elaine wanted two stalls,” Mr. Halverson said. There was the smallest dry edge of a smile. “I heard about that for some years.”
“I knew, and I didn’t walk over,” Lloyd said. “All I had to do was go through that gate and say, Dale, I was wrong, I was hot, it’s four feet of dirt and our wives are friends. That’s all. It would’ve taken me a minute and a half. I didn’t do it because I’d have had to tell Verna I’d misled her, and because I didn’t care to be the one who backed down. So I let it set. A day, then a month, then it was Christmas, and then it was too big to pick up.”
He put out his hand. It was shaking.
“I let two women lose each other over my pride. I let my kids grow up thinking you were something you never were. And I let you eat by yourself over there for fifteen years where I could see your light. I’m sorry, Dale. It’s the sorriest thing I ever did and I did it every single day.”
Mr. Halverson looked at that hand for a long moment.
“I could’ve come through the gate too,” he said. “It swings both ways. I told myself it was your place to. A man can sit a long time on that.” He shifted his cane to his left hand. “She asked about you, Verna. The last week. She couldn’t get to the window by then, so every evening she’d ask me was your kitchen light on. I’d say yes. She’d say good.”
He took Lloyd’s hand.
“I should have come over here and got you. She would have wanted you, and I knew it, and I was too stiff-necked to cross forty feet of grass. So I don’t believe I’ve got any business holding a thing against anybody in this house.”
Verna made a sound I hope I never hear again, and then she was across the room. She is not a woman who touches people. She took that old man’s free hand in both of hers and held it against her chest and bent her head over it.
“The peonies,” she said. “Dale. Who’s been mulching my mother’s peonies?”