The Graduation Check He Took Back

When she was finished she unsnapped the cape and shook it out on the grass. She handed him Olive’s old hand mirror.

He held it up and turned his head and ran his hand up the back of his neck, right over the spot behind his left ear.

“Your grandma left it longer on top,” he said.

“I know,” Nadia said. “You look better this way.”

He almost smiled. I saw the corner of his mouth go and then he caught it.

He handed her back the mirror and got up and went to the shed and got the push broom and swept up his own hair off the grass, the way he always had for Olive.

Then he went back in the house and let the screen door slap shut. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say goodbye.

Nadia packed her bag, carried the chair back under the eave, and walked down the driveway to the car. She got in and buckled her seat belt and looked straight ahead.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “He swept up.”

“He swept up,” she said, and then she put her face in her hands and laughed until she cried, or cried until she laughed. I never did figure out which.

October, November

The first Saturday in October, we pulled into Silas’s driveway at nine and the chair was already out under the maple.

He was sitting on the porch with his coffee, waiting. He did not get up until Nadia got all the way to the yard.

That time he talked a little. He asked her how long the drive to Columbus was. He asked if the school was the one by the old bowling alley. He asked how many hours she had.

“Two hundred and forty,” Nadia said.

“Out of fifteen hundred.”

“Out of fifteen hundred.”

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else.

But when we left, I saw him go in the house, and through the window I saw him stop by the feed store calendar on the wall by the door and write something on it.

In November the maple was bare, and Silas had run an orange extension cord across the yard for her clippers.

“Three hundred and eighty,” Nadia told him before he even asked, and he nodded like a man checking a gauge.

He never brought up the check. Neither did she. But that afternoon, when she shook out the cape, he said, “Your grandma would have liked that cape snapping again.”

That was all. It went in my chest like a splinter and it’s still there.

The coffee group

In December I heard about the coffee group.

One of the men, Norman Fisk, is on my route. He’s eighty-one and still gets the farm paper by mail because he doesn’t trust the computer to keep the prices honest.

He was waiting at his box for me one morning, which he does when he wants to talk.

“Your girl does good work,” he said, leaning on the post. “Silas came in Saturday with a real haircut. First one in two years. Ulysses asked him if he’d been to a barber in Indianapolis.”

“What did Silas say?”

Norman grinned. “Said his granddaughter did it. Said she’s in beauty school in Columbus. Said it like a man telling you his grandson made the varsity.”

“He’s not a bad man, Maureen,” Norman said. “You know that. He just never got told he was wrong much. Olive did it, and she’s gone.”

“Thad told him,” I said.

“Thad told him on the phone.” Norman shook his head. “That’s not the same as somebody making him look at it.”