The Street I Mowed the Day I Got Home

She set her bowl down. “Honey, I can’t pay you much. The boy who used to do it, he’s gone to camp, and your uncle wanted” She stopped herself. “Your uncle’s price was dear.”

I stood there in the heat and I thought, so Ray had been by Miss Edna too. Of course he had.

A man who finds one well does not stop at one bucket.

It made a sick kind of sense to me then. A street of widows on fixed checks, every one of them raised to pay a bill and not make a fuss, and all of them too proud to say the price was robbing them.

Ray had not invented a crime. He had just found a row of good women who would rather go without than argue, and he had walked down it with his hand out.

“Miss Edna,” I said. “I am not charging anybody anything today. I am just a Marine with a sharp blade and a morning off. You snap your beans.”

She put her hand up to her mouth. She did not say anything for a second.

Then she said, “Your grandpa would be so proud of you,” and she sat back down, and I cut her grass.

The Sweet Tea Brigade

Word on a street like ours travels faster than any mower.

By the time I was halfway through Miss Edna’s front yard, Mrs. Pruett had come out onto her porch to watch. By the time I finished it, Dorothy Kincaid was standing at the edge of her drive in her garden gloves.

And by the time I rolled the mower to the Settle place, there was a woman I did not know walking across the street toward me. She had a tall glass of sweet tea sweating in her hand.

She was younger than the rest, maybe fifty, in jeans and a church-sale t-shirt. She handed me the tea and I shut the mower off.

“You’re Lou’s grandson,” she said. “I’m Brenda, I rent the Carter house. Lou talks about you every single day. You’re all she talks about.”

She looked down the street at the two finished yards, dark-striped and clean among all the shaggy ones. “Did you do Edna’s too?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“For free.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Brenda looked at me a long second, and something worked in her jaw. “Her son’s been charging these old women. You know that.”

“He came to my door too, wanted eighty dollars a week and acted like he was doing me a favor.” She shook her head. “I told him where he could put his mower.”

I drank the tea. It was good, real tea, brewed not from a mix, with the mint in it. “I know it,” I said. “I found out last night.”

“You gonna do the whole street?”

I looked down Sycamore. At all those high shaggy lawns and all those porches with somebody standing on them now, watching.

The heat was coming up in waves off the asphalt and my shirt was soaked. My hands were already blistering up soft, the way they do when you have been overseas not pushing a mower for half a year.

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I believe I am.”

Brenda smiled. “Then I’m making more tea,” she said, and she went off to do it. I pulled the cord and set into the Settle yard.