The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

“I’m using Pawpaw’s rake,” he told her. “Daddy said I could. He said Pawpaw would want me to.”

Vonda looked at the rake leaning against his shoulder, the black tape on the handle, the burned letters. Her chin did something I had never seen it do in fifteen years. It wobbled.

“I see that,” she said. “He taped that handle up in 1994. Your daddy broke it jumping off the porch into a leaf pile. Your Pawpaw didn’t even fuss. He just went and got the tape.”

Rhett’s eyes went wide. He spun around. “Daddy! You broke Pawpaw’s rake?”

“I was seven,” Clay said from across the yard. “Same as you. Don’t get any ideas, son.”

Vonda picked up the empty tray from where she had set it on the grass.

She turned to go back to the house. Then she stopped, halfway across the yard, and spoke without turning around.

“There’s more on the stove,” she said. “If you two want some.”

Then she went up the steps, one at a time, holding the rail, and in the house, and she shut the door behind her.

Clay and I looked at each other across that yard. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

We had been married fifteen years, and his mother had just spoken to both of us, together, as “you two,” for the first time I could remember.

We did not go in. It was not time yet, and we both knew it. We finished the yard and left twenty bags at the curb.

Gracie rinsed the two empty mugs under the spigot and set them on the porch rail, and that felt right.

The fourth Saturday was the nineteenth, the last one before Christmas. When we pulled in at eight, there was a kitchen chair sitting out on the front porch with a folded quilt in it.

On the porch rail sat four mugs, not two, with a big thermos beside them. Clay saw it first.

He put the truck in park and just sat there looking at it with both hands still on the wheel.

The door opened before he had the tailgate down. Vonda came out in her coat and sat down in the kitchen chair and pulled the quilt over her lap like she had been waiting since daylight.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t stand there gawking. Those leaves won’t rake themselves, and I’m not paying a quarter a bag.”

So we raked. And she sat on the porch and watched us, out in the open now, in front of the whole street. Mr. Whitaker came out on his porch across the road with his coffee, saw her, and lifted his cup. She lifted her mug right back.

About halfway through the morning she started talking. Not to anybody in particular.

Just talking, the way old people do when there’s work going on in front of them and they have been alone too long.

“Ray always started at the back fence and worked toward the road,” she said. “Said it was easier to drag it downhill. Clay, you’re doing it backwards. You always did it backwards.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Clay said, and he went and started over at the back fence without another word.

“Ray used to burn them, before the town made that rule,” she said a while later. “The whole street smelled like it. Every Saturday in November. Lord, I miss that smell.”

“I remember it,” Clay said. “You’d make chili on burning days. With the crackers on the side.”