The first thing I noticed was that Orville’s sprinkler had stopped. He ran it every morning at six on the little patch of grass his wife had loved, and that Tuesday it was quiet.
By nine the thermometer on our porch post read 101. By ten I saw Orville come out his back door with a dish pan and walk slow toward the old pump house, then stand there with his hand on the door like he had forgotten why he came.
I was home that day because the clinic in Stockton closes Tuesdays in August. I am a veterinary technician. I spend most of my days with my arm inside a cow or holding a scared dog still, and I know what a body looks like when it is too hot.
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Orville Kuhn was 87 years old. He had a bad heart, a bottle of pills on his windowsill, and a doctor in Hays who told him to drink water all day long in the summer and never let himself get dry.
I put on my boots and walked across the dry yard between our two houses. The grass crunched under me like cornflakes. A grasshopper hit my leg and kept going.
“Orville,” I said. “Is your pump out?”
He turned around and gave me the smile he gave everybody, the one that said he did not want to be a bother to anybody alive. He had on his light blue short-sleeve shirt and his suspenders, the same as every day.
“It’s nothing, Tessa,” he said. “Gil turned it off.”
“Gil turned off your water?”
“Just the breaker,” he said, as if that made it smaller. “Out at the pole. He put a padlock on the box. He says it’s a reminder.”
I stood there in that heat and tried to make the words mean something else. They did not mean anything else.