I did not think my own brother would climb up to a child’s hiding shelf and take a boy’s leaf money. You do not think that about your blood until your blood shows you.
I did not call the sheriff. Let me say why, plain, because I know how it looks.
He is my brother. I was not going to put my own brother in a cell over a coffee can.
And I was not going to drag my mother, who is seventy-four and thinks the sun rises on Rick, through watching her son booked. That is not softness. I know exactly what he did.
I just knew the law would cost more than it would ever get back. The only one who would really pay was an old woman in a nursing recliner three streets over.
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But I was not going to do nothing, either. Doing nothing teaches a boy that the world takes what it wants and you swallow it. I was not raising that boy.
I told Cole the next morning, before school, with his cereal going soft in the bowl. I told him I was near certain his uncle Rick had taken it, and that we were not going to the sheriff, and that I needed him to trust me on why.
He looked at me a long time with Dale’s steady eyes.
“So the money’s just gone,” he said.
“The money’s gone,” I said. “What you did to earn it isn’t. Finish your cereal. I’ve got an idea, and I need you to be brave enough to look a little foolish.”
The First Widow
Our street is mostly widows. That is just the arithmetic of a town like ours.
The men go first and the women stay on in the houses. Forty and fifty years in the same house. The leaves still fall whether there is a man left to rake them or not.
Mrs. Dillard was Cole’s first customer back in September, the one who paid him five dollars and gave him a glass of cider. So she was the one we went to first with the new plan.
I walked up her steps on Saturday morning with Cole behind me carrying both rakes. I knocked. When she came to the door I said, “Mrs. Dillard, Cole is going to do your yard today, and there is no charge. Not today and not the rest of the fall.”
She started to argue. People always want to pay, especially proud old women who have never taken a thing they did not earn.
“I can pay the boy,” she said. “I always pay the boy.”
“Not this fall,” I said. “He’s got his reasons, and they’re good ones, and I’ll tell you the whole of it over coffee sometime. Today he just rakes.”