The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

The phone behind the counter rang at twenty past one on a Friday afternoon, right while I was ringing up a man for two cans of chewing tobacco and a gallon of milk.

I tucked the receiver against my shoulder and kept counting his change. “Gas station, this is Shay.” The man nodded at me and pushed out the door into the cold.

“Shay, it’s Harlan Voss.” His voice was the same as always, slow and even, like a man reading a weather report. “I’m calling about the rent tomorrow, so you don’t come up short.”

I had never once come up short on Harlan Voss. Not in four years. I said so, nicely, and he made a little sound like he already knew it and did not need reminding.

“No, I mean you’ll come up over,” he said. “Just bring me $515 this month. I took the boy’s raking off what you owe me. Nine yards at fifteen apiece. That’s $135. We’re square.”

I stood there with the drawer still open. Outside, a coal truck geared down on the highway, and the window by the register rattled the way it does every time one goes by.

“Harlan,” I said, “you told Rowan you’d pay him when he finished.”

“And I am paying him,” he said. “I’m paying you. Same household. Saves everybody a trip to the bank. You tell him he did good work. He did. That Wythe Street yard had leaves to the porch.”

There were three people waiting behind a lady buying lottery tickets. I said, “We’ll talk tomorrow,” and he said, “Nothing to talk about, it’s done,” and he hung up before I could say anything else.

I closed the drawer. I handed the lottery lady her tickets and her change.

I did not let my face do anything at all, because I have worked a cash register for eleven years and I know how to hold still.

But inside, I was already counting.

My son Rowan was thirteen that fall. He was all elbows and hair, shaggy brown hair he would not let me cut, and he lived in an old green flannel shirt that used to be mine.

He had been playing a borrowed guitar since he was eleven. A man from church named Ivo had lent it to him, a little three-quarter guitar with a crack along the side that Ivo had glued and clamped himself in his garage.

Rowan had long since outgrown it. His knees came up too high when he held it, and his fingers were getting too long for the neck.

He never said a word about it. He just played it on the front steps every afternoon after school.

Then in September he walked past Abner Lusk’s pawn shop on the way home and stopped dead in front of the window.

There was a full-size acoustic guitar hanging there, used, with a scratch near the sound hole and a tag on the neck that said $175.

He came home and did not tell me about it for two whole days. That is how I knew it mattered.