The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

That it was something his mother had to squabble over, and maybe win and maybe lose.

I did not want him to think his nine yards were a quarrel. I wanted him to know they were wages. Plain, earned, counted out. A fact, not an argument.

And there was the other thing, the thing any woman who rents in a small town knows. Harlan owned nine houses.

There were not many two-bedroom places in Bluefield for $650 a month with a yard and a landlord who fixed things himself. I was not going to burn that house down over a phone call.

So I looked at my son standing on the steps with his hands in the pockets of my old flannel, and I said, “Tomorrow, baby. You’ll have it tomorrow.”

He grinned so big I had to go inside.

I keep a coffee can of grease under the sink and a canister of flour on the counter, and the flour canister has never had flour in it. It has the Christmas envelope.

Every week since August I had been putting in what I could from extra shifts. Ten here, twenty there.

That November there was $210 in it. It was meant for Rowan’s Christmas, and for a ham, and maybe a coat that fit him.

I sat at the kitchen table with the envelope and counted out $135. I counted it twice.

I made it all tens and fives, nine tens and nine fives, because I wanted to be able to count it out to him the way Harlan should have.

Then I got out the rent money, which was in a different envelope in my purse, $650 in twenties and fifties that I had drawn out of the bank on Thursday.

I sat there a long time looking at the two envelopes side by side. That left $75 for Christmas. It would have to be enough.

I said a little prayer, the kind I say when I am not sure I am doing the right thing but I am going to do it anyway.

Then I put both envelopes in the inside pocket of my black puffer vest and zipped it.

The fifteenth came up crisp and clear. There had been frost on the windshield at dawn, and by early afternoon the sun was out over everything and the sky was that hard bright blue you only get in November.

Rowan put on his flannel without being asked. I put my hair up in a bun and pulled on my vest.

I did not tell him what I was going to do. I only said, “We’re going to pay the rent. Come with me.”

Harlan lives across town in a tan house with a small wooden porch and a white column at the corner.

Every tenant he has knows that porch. He takes the rent there on the fifteenth, in person, and writes you a receipt in a little carbon book.

When we pulled up, Rowan said, “Look, Mama,” and pointed. Harlan’s own yard was raked clean. The leaves were piled at the foot of the porch steps and along the side yard, waiting to be bagged.