“Smoke’s good for the sinuses, Sandra. Clears a person right out.”
That is what Lyle Becker said to me across four strands of wire fence, with a piece of rebar in his hand and a trash fire going in a rusty barrel at his knee.
Then he laughed. It was not a mean laugh. I want to be fair to the man from the start. It was the laugh of somebody who has decided a thing is small and would like you to decide the same so he can get back to it.
Behind me, on my clothesline, hung my mother’s wedding quilt.
It had gone out at eight o’clock that morning the color of strawberry ice cream and a summer sky. It was now the color of a dishrag.
“Lyle,” I said, “I asked you to look at my line.”
“I looked at it.”
“And?”
“And it’s wash.” He poked the barrel. Something in there popped, and a curl of black went up with the gray. “Wash dries, smoke or no smoke. My mother hung hers out next to a coal stove chimney her whole life.”
“Did it smell like a milk jug?”
He thought about that, which I will also give him credit for.
“I couldn’t say,” he said. “I was a boy.”
I stood there. I am fifty-nine years old and I have been married thirty-six years to a man who drives a truck, which means I have had a great deal of practice at standing still while deciding what not to say.
What I did not say was whose quilt it was. I don’t know why. I think I knew that if I said the words “my mother’s wedding quilt” out loud to a man who was laughing, and he kept laughing, I would have to stop being his neighbor, and I was not ready to do that on a Monday morning with tomatoes on the stove.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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