The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

Through the window I could see Clay still sitting there, and Vonda back down at the head of the table, and neither one of them moving.

After about five minutes he stood up, kissed his mother on the top of her head, and came out the door.

“Let’s go home,” he said, and he picked Rhett up and carried him to the truck like he was four years old again, roll and all.

On the drive home Clay didn’t say much. The kids were quiet in the back seat. Rhett fell asleep against the window with crumbs still on his shirt and his mouth hanging open.

We passed the Dollar General and the Baptist church and the feed store, all closed for the holiday.

At the four-way stop at the bottom of the hill, Clay sat there longer than he needed to. Nobody was coming from any direction.

“Her leaves aren’t raked,” he said.

I looked over at him. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way his daddy taught him when he was fifteen in the farm truck.

“Did you see the yard?” he said. “Did you see it? Those oaks are dumping, and she hasn’t touched it. It was the same last year. The leaves sat there all winter and killed half the grass.”

I had seen it. I had noticed it walking up the front steps, the leaves piled in drifts against the porch and matted down in the flower beds where nobody had cleared them since spring.

“Daddy raked that yard every Saturday in the fall,” Clay said. “Every one. From the first of November till Christmas. I was out there with him from the time I could hold a rake. He’d give me a quarter a bag.”

“I know,” I said. “You told me. You said you made eleven dollars one year and bought a pocketknife at the hardware store.”

“She can’t do it herself,” he said. “Not with that hip. She won’t hire anybody either. She says nobody does it right.”

That was true. I had watched Vonda all through dinner. She favored her right hip getting up and sitting down, and she had held the back of her chair to stand and read that will.

I would have bet my next paycheck she hurt worse than she let on.

Clay finally pulled through the stop sign. “I’m going over Saturday,” he said. “I’m going to rake it. I don’t care what she says.”

“We are going over Saturday,” I said.

He looked at me then for the first time since the table. “Jenna, she just cut me off with a dollar in front of my kids, and you want to go rake her yard.”

“She just cut you off with a dollar in front of your kids,” I said, “and you just told me you want to go rake her yard. I’m only agreeing with you, Clay Hollister.”

People have asked me since why we didn’t fight it. Why we didn’t call a lawyer of our own, or go over there and have it out with her, or just never speak to her again as long as we lived.

It was her will and her money. She could leave it to her sister’s boys or the church or the animal shelter if she wanted to.

And a will can be changed any day of the week, right up until the day it can’t.