The Envelope in the School Lot

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, and I believed him.

I cleaned my one o’clock’s teeth that afternoon and I could not tell you one thing about her mouth.

I kept seeing that boy behind his mower in July, his face red as his hair, wiping his forehead with the hem of his shirt.

Teague started mowing the week school let out. He had his grandpa’s old push mower, the one with the bent handle, and a gas can he carried down the sidewalk in a wagon because he was too young to drive.

He made a list on notebook paper and stapled it to the corkboard in his dad’s kitchen.

Name, street, how much, what day. By the Fourth of July he had nineteen lawns on it. By August he had thirty-one.

Some yards paid him twenty-five dollars. The big corner lots paid thirty-five. Most people paid him in cash at the door, in fives and tens, the way people do when a boy with a mower is standing on the porch steps.

One of them was Mrs. Wilma Kessinger on my street, who is eighty-six and has outlived two husbands and a German shepherd.

She paid him thirty dollars a week and handed him a glass of lemonade every single time.

“That boy,” she told me once over the fence, “edges the walk like his grandfather did. Nobody edges anymore. He sweeps the clippings off my steps so I don’t slip. You tell your brother he raised a good one.”

I did tell my brother. Sorley smiled when I said it, and for a second he looked like the big brother who used to carry me piggyback home from the swimming pool in August.

Sorley is forty-five. He worked at the tire plant for twenty-two years, the same as our dad did before him, and he was good at it.

He ran a press on second shift and could tell by the sound when something was about to go wrong.

He and Teague’s mother split when Teague was six. She moved down to Columbus and remarried and sends a card at Christmas with a twenty in it.

Sorley raised that boy mostly alone, and for a long time he did a decent job of it.

Then in January the plant laid off a whole line, and Sorley was on it.

I knew it was hard on him. I brought over a pan of goulash the first week and he barely looked up from the television.

I told myself he needed time. A man who has worked since he was eighteen does not know what to do with a Tuesday.

What I did not know was where he went in the afternoons when Teague was at school.

I found that out on Thursday, the morning after Mr. Fadness called, from a man lying back in my dental chair with his mouth open.

His name is Ozzie. He owns the bar out on the county road past the grain elevator, the one with the gravel lot and the beer signs in the windows.

He has been my patient for eleven years and he talks the whole time, even with my mirror in his mouth.

“How’s that brother of yours?” he asked when I let him rinse. “I see him more than I see my own wife lately. Shame about the plant. A lot of those boys are hurting.”