So I said, “All right, Lyle.”
“All right,” he said, pleased, as if we had settled it.
I walked back up the yard.
The wind was out of the south, the way it is here from May until the corn comes out, and it walked right along with me, carrying his trash.
I took the quilt down the way you would lift a sleeping child out of a car seat.
You do not pin a quilt that old. Pins pull, and the weight of the thing hanging from two little points will tear seventy-two years of hand stitching in an afternoon. You drape it over two lines at once, so it lies in a kind of hammock, and you put it on the shady side of the sheets, and you give it two hours of moving air. Mother taught me that. Her mother taught her.
It is a Double Wedding Ring: rings the size of dinner plates, linked like a chain, each pieced from wedges of print no bigger than a stick of gum. Pinks and blues, mostly, with a green here and there where Grandma ran short. Some of the wedges are feed sack. I can still pick out the one with the tiny bluebirds, because when I was little I used to find it with my finger before I went to sleep.
Grandma pieced it over the winter of 1953 and the church ladies quilted it on a frame in her front room that spring. In the corner, in pink floss, it says Irene and Walter, June 12, 1954.
It weighs five pounds. I know because Mother weighed it once on the bathroom scale, holding it and then not holding it, to settle an argument with my aunt.
It had always smelled like her cedar chest. A dry, sweet, pencil-shavings smell. When she died two years ago in March, at ninety, that chest came to me, and I used to lift the lid some evenings for no reason except to breathe in.
I carried the quilt into the spare room and laid it out on a clean sheet on the bed and put my face down to it.
Burnt plastic. Bread bag and milk jug and whatever else a man eats out of when he is cooking for one.
I opened both windows on the north side. Then I went and turned off my tomatoes, because I was not going to can anything decent in the frame of mind I was in.
I should tell you how we got to that fence, because it did not start that Monday.
Lyle and Joan Becker lived south of us for twenty-six years. You could not have asked for better. Lyle ran a road maintainer for the county for thirty years, and ours was the best bladed stretch of gravel in Boone County. Joan took home the last of my zucchini every September, which is the real test of a friend.
Joan burned on Mondays.
She had a reason. She washed on Tuesdays, so Monday the barrel could smoke all it wanted and her own line was bare. And she only ever burned paper. Feed sacks, the newspaper, junk mail, the box the cereal came in. They had the trash pickup for everything else, same as us, same as everybody out here who doesn’t want to haul to the transfer station. Thirty-one dollars a month, a green cart at the end of the lane on Thursdays.
Here is a thing I did not understand until this fall. In twenty-six years, Joan’s Monday smoke never once touched my Monday wash.
I never thought about why. You don’t think about the things that go right.
Joan died a year ago August. Her heart, in the night, no warning. I took food over for a month and Tom mowed for him until the frost, and then winter came and we waved from our pickups the way people do.
In April he quit the trash service.
The hauler came and took the green cart from the end of his lane. A man alone doesn’t make much trash, and thirty-one dollars a month is three hundred seventy-two dollars a year, and a county pension is not a fortune. I didn’t think a thing about it.
Then the wind turned around to the south in May, and the first Monday I had sheets out, they came in smelling like a tire.
He was burning all of it now. Everything that used to go in the green cart. And he was burning it Monday morning about ten past nine, because Monday was the day, and nobody had ever told him there was more to it than the day.
The first time I asked was in June. I caught him at that same fence and I was as pleasant as I know how to be.
“Lyle, I wash Mondays. I wonder if you could burn a different day. Or wait until evening, when it’s in.”
“Why, sure,” he said. “Sure I can.”
And I believe he meant it. He just did not have anywhere in his head to keep it. The next Monday at ten past nine, up it went.
The second time was July. I baked zucchini bread and carried a loaf over, because my mother raised me to believe you can say nearly anything to a person if you are holding something warm.
He had me into the kitchen. It was clean. Cleaner than mine. And there on the counter by the coffee maker were two cups, set out upside down on a dish towel, his and one with yellow roses on it.
I looked at those two cups a little too long and he saw me do it, and neither one of us said a word about it.
“I’ll make it easy,” I told him. “Wash days, I’ll hang a red dish towel on the end pole. You see red, you wait. That’s all you have to remember.”
“You do that,” he said. “That’s a good system.”
I hung that red towel four Mondays running. You could see that towel from the highway.
Up it went.
The third time I telephoned, in August, on a Sunday night, thinking a reminder the night before might stick. I got his answering machine. It is still Joan’s voice on it. I was so rattled to hear her that I left a message like a woman reading a grocery list. Monday, wash, red towel, thank you, this is Sandra, from next door. As if there were another Sandra.
Up it went.
By September I was doing sheets at night and running them through the dryer, and resenting every minute. Sheets off a line smell like the inside of a cloud. Sheets out of a dryer smell like a dryer.
But the quilt does not go in a dryer. The quilt gets aired twice a year, late September and the first warm week of May, and it has been that way since before I was born.
I checked for the barrel that morning. I truly did. At eight o’clock there was nothing going over there, and his pickup was gone, and I thought he had driven into Albion for the day. I hung the sheets. I hung my red towel out of plain stubbornness. I draped the quilt.
Then I went in to my tomatoes, and my kitchen windows face north, and I had the radio on.
He had only gone for gas.
Tom called that night from a truck stop outside Rawlins. He hauls for an outfit out of Columbus, out on Sunday night or Monday before daylight and home Friday, and he calls every night at eight our time whether he has anything to say or not.
I told him.
There was a long quiet on the line, and the sound of somebody’s diesel idling.
“Irene’s quilt,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The wedding one.”
“Yes, Tom.”
“And he laughed.”
“He said smoke was good for the sinuses.”
“I’m home Friday,” he said. “I’ll go over and have a talk with him.”
“You will not.”
“Sandra.”
“Thomas. I have heard your talks. Your talks are about nine words long and then somebody has to sell their house.”
“Lyle bladed our road for thirty years. He pulled you out of the ditch in the blizzard of 2009. He’s seventy-one and his wife is dead and he doesn’t know what day it is without her. I’m not having you go over there and be large at him.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You could call Bud Hagen. That’s a fire matter. You can’t burn garbage. Bud would be out there in ten minutes.”
“With the red truck and the lights, and Lyle standing in his yard being written up while the whole road drives by slow? No.”
“Then the sheriff.”
“That’s what my sister said. I’m not turning in a neighbor over laundry, Tom. I have to live next to that man Monday through Friday by myself. I’d like to still be able to borrow his ladder.”
He didn’t argue. He knows the difference between when I am thinking out loud and when I have landed.
“You’ll figure it,” he said. “You always do. Leave me something to do when you have.”
On Tuesday, on my lunch hour, I called a cleaner in Norfolk. I work the front desk at the dentist’s office in Albion, Tuesday through Friday, and one of our hygienists had her grandmother’s christening gown done there and swore by the woman.
“What was burning?” the woman asked.
“Household trash. Plastic.”
She made a small sound. “Plastic is oily. It gets down in the batting. I’d do it by hand, in the tub, flat. Three or four soaks. Eighty-five dollars. And I want to be honest with you, I can’t make promises on the smell, and I won’t make any on the pink. Those old pinks let go if you look at them wrong.”
“Eighty-five dollars and no promises.”
“That’s the truth of it. You could try airing it a week first. Sometimes air does more than I can.”
I wrote $85 on the corner of the desk calendar. Eighty-five dollars is groceries. But it was the “no promises” that sat on me. I kept thinking about the bluebird patch.
I aired it all week. Windows open on the north side, a box fan in the doorway. By Friday it smelled less like a milk jug and more like the memory of one.
Tom came in Friday at suppertime. He set his bag down, kissed me, and walked straight down the hall to the spare room without taking his cap off.
He bent down and smelled that quilt, this big man with his hands on his knees, and when he stood back up his jaw was working.
“I’m going over there.”
“Sit down, I have it handled.”
“Handled how?”
“I’m having Doris Hagen out for coffee Monday morning.”
He looked at me.
I watched him work it through. The fire chief’s wife. Monday morning. On the porch, most likely. I saw it arrive.
“Does Doris know why?”
“Doris knows I have her pie plate.”
He sat down on the edge of the spare bed, careful of the quilt, and laughed until he had to take his glasses off.
“You are your mother’s daughter,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’m having a friend to coffee. If Lyle doesn’t burn, we’ll have a nice visit and she’ll get her pie plate. If he waits till evening like I asked him, there is no harm done to anybody on this earth.”
“And if he doesn’t wait.”
“Then somebody besides me will have smelled it.”
That was the whole of my plan. I was only going to stop being the single person in Boone County who knew.
Sunday after church I caught Doris at the coat rack in the fellowship hall.
You would have to know Doris. She is seventy, built low to the ground, and she has run the funeral lunch committee at our Methodist church since before the carpet was changed. She has been married to Bud Hagen for forty years, and he has been chief of the volunteer department for twenty-two of them. She is a woman of firm opinions on ham, hymns and fire, in about that order.
She had brought a sour cream raisin pie to Mother’s funeral lunch two years ago, and I had never returned the plate.
“Doris, come out for coffee tomorrow. I still have your pie plate and I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Two years, Sandra.”
“I know it.”
“I’d written that plate off. I’d grieved it.” She was getting her arm into her coat. “What time?”
“Quarter to nine?”
“I’ll bring nothing, then, since you owe me.”
“That’s fair.”
I did not say why. If I had told her, it would have been a report, and I had already decided I was not making one.
Monday came up bright, with a breeze. South, twelve miles an hour by the radio. A perfect drying day.
I stripped both beds and had the white sheets on the line by eight. I hung my red dish towel on the end pole, where it has hung every Monday since July, snapping like a flag.
Then I made a coffee cake, because you do not ask a woman out six miles of gravel for coffee alone.
Doris pulled in at 8:45 on the dot with her purse on her arm. We sat on the back porch. I have two metal chairs out there that were Mother’s and a little table between, and from those chairs you look down the whole length of the yard: clothesline, garden, wire fence, and Lyle’s place beyond it.
I poured. She took a piece of coffee cake and inspected the bottom of it before she ate it, the way good cooks do.
“Buttermilk,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Hm,” she said, which from Doris is a blue ribbon.
We talked about the fall bazaar, and whether anybody under sixty was ever going to sign up for funeral lunches. Her pie plate sat on the table between us, washed and shining.
Nine o’clock came.
Five after.
I will admit that I got up to fetch the cream I had already brought out, so that I could look at the kitchen clock. I will admit I did it twice.
Lyle’s pickup was in the yard. His kitchen light was on. And I sat there with the oddest feeling in my chest, because some part of me was hoping, hard, that he would stay in. That he had seen the red towel. That this one Monday he would remember, and Doris would eat her cake and take her plate, and I would be a foolish woman who had baked for nothing.
At 9:10 his back door opened.
He came down the steps with a white kitchen trash bag in one hand and the rebar in the other. He did not look north. He dropped the bag in the barrel, bent, and I saw the little flare of the lighter.
Doris was telling me about her knee. The doctor in Norfolk wanted to replace it and she wanted to know what was wrong with the one the Lord had issued her.
The smoke started thin. A gray thread, straight up, polite.
Then the bag caught, and it thickened, and the south wind laid it over like a hand pushing down a cowlick. It came north through the wire. It went through my garden. It reached the clothesline and went into those white sheets and through them and out the other side, and the sheets bellied toward us, full of it.
Then it came up on the porch.
Doris stopped in the middle of a word.
She sniffed, once, short, the way a woman does who has washed a fireman’s shirts since 1986.
She turned her head and looked at the barrel. She looked at Lyle, standing over it with his rebar. She looked at my sheets, and at the red towel going gray on the end pole. She looked at the distance between the barrel and my fence, and I watched her measure it with her eyes as plainly as if she’d had a tape.
Then she looked at me, and she looked a good long while.
“Sandra,” she said, “how many Mondays?”
“Since May.”
She set her cup down on the porch rail.
“That is not paper.”
“No.”
“That’s a milk jug. And foam. One of those meat trays.” She sniffed again. “And something with a coating on it. I have been married to that man forty years. I can smell a meat tray at a quarter mile.”
“I expect you can.”
“You’ve asked him.”
“Three times. Nicely. I offered to hang that towel so he’d know.”
She looked at the towel. Then back at me.
“And you didn’t call Bud.”
“I’m not turning in a neighbor over wash, Doris.”
“No,” she said slowly. “You invited me for coffee.”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say that would improve my position.
The corner of her mouth went up, just the one corner, and she nodded the way you would nod at a well-turned pie crust.
“Irene would have done the very same thing,” she said. “Only she’d have had the whole committee out here.”
Then she opened her purse and took out her phone.
“Bud. Where are you right this minute?” She listened. “Well, when you’re done at the elevator, you drive out to Lyle Becker’s. No. No, not the truck. Your own pickup. Nobody’s in trouble. He’s burning his kitchen trash twenty-some feet off Sandra’s fence in a south wind and she’s been breathing it since May and never said boo.” She listened again. “Because she’s a better neighbor than I’d be, that’s why. And Bud. He lost Joan a year ago. You go as a friend.”
She put the phone away and picked her cup back up.
“Now,” she said. “My knee.”
She stayed another half hour. When she left she smelled of smoke and so did I, and she stood by her car and looked down the yard once more.
“What did it get?” she asked. “Besides sheets. You wouldn’t have done this for sheets.”
So I took her in and showed her.
She stood over the quilt in the spare room with her hand flat on her chest. She found the pink floss in the corner and read it. She had known my mother fifty years.
“Oh, Sandra,” she said. That was all, and it was plenty.
She drove off without her pie plate. I found it on the porch table an hour later. I have begun to think that plate and I are meant to be together.
Bud Hagen’s pickup turned in at Lyle’s a little before noon.
I was washing the sheets over again, and the laundry room window happens to face that way.
No red truck, no clipboard. Lyle came out on the step. They shook hands. Then the two of them walked back to the barrel and stood there, one on each side of it, looking down into it the way men look into the engine of a car.
They stood there forty minutes.
I could not hear a word. I saw Bud point north at my line. I saw him walk it, heel to toe, from the barrel to the fence, counting. I saw Lyle take his cap off, put it back on, and take it off again. At one point Bud tipped the barrel with his boot and looked at the bottom of it and shook his head.
Then Bud put a hand on Lyle’s shoulder, left it there a moment, got in his pickup and drove away. He lifted two fingers off the wheel at my house as he passed.
Lyle stood in his yard alone for a long time after. Then he went in.
I did not feel the way I had expected to feel. I had thought I would feel like a woman who had won something. I felt like a woman who had watched an old man get told.
He came at a quarter to seven.
I saw him from the kitchen, coming around by the gate instead of across the yard, the long way, the proper way. He had on a clean shirt. He was carrying his cap.
I met him at the back door.
“Sandra.”
“Lyle. Come in.”
“I’ll stand here, if it’s the same to you. I’ve got something to say and I’d as soon say it before I sit in a person’s kitchen.”
“All right.”
He turned the cap around once in his hands.
“Bud Hagen came out today.”
“I saw his pickup.”
“He says he’s not there with the book. He says he’s there because his wife came home smelling like a tire fire and he has to live with her.” A dry little breath, nearly a laugh. “Then he told me the book anyhow. You can’t burn garbage. Not plastic, not food trash, none of it, not out here and not in town. Paper and cardboard and dry brush, if a man has to burn, and a screen over the top of the barrel, and mine’s rusted through at the bottom so it’s no good regardless. He likes fifty feet from anything that’ll catch. He paced it. I’m twenty-two feet off your fence.” He looked at the cap. “And not in a wind over ten, and not at all when it’s dry and he’s got a ban on. He says I’ve been lucky all summer I didn’t set your garden afire, let alone the rest.”
“I’m glad he told you kindly.”
“He did. He’s a good man. He could’ve written me up and he didn’t.” He lifted his eyes. “He said you never called him.”
“I didn’t.”
“He said you asked me three times.”
“I did.”
“I remember the bread,” he said. “I remember the towel. I’d see that towel, Sandra, and I’d think, now what was that towel about. And then I’d go light the barrel, because it was Monday.” His voice went a little rough. “Joan burned Mondays. Forty-eight years. I don’t know why Monday. I never asked her. I can run a maintainer in a whiteout, and I did not know what day to burn the trash without her telling me.”
I had come to the door with some things ready to say. I let them go.
“She washed Tuesdays,” I said. “That’s why Monday. Her own line was empty.”
He stared at me.
“And she only burned paper. And Lyle, in twenty-six years her smoke never once came on my wash. I’ve been thinking about it all week. She must have looked. Every Monday, before she struck a match, she must have looked north to see if I had anything out, and waited if I did.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. A man that age doesn’t cry easily and he didn’t, quite.
“She never told me she looked,” he said.
“I don’t suppose she thought of it as anything. It’s just what you do.”
“It’s what she did.” He cleared his throat. “Bud says it wasn’t only sheets. He says Doris told him there was a quilt.”
“Come in, Lyle.”
This time he came. He wiped his boots four times on a mat that did not need it.
I took him down the hall. The quilt was still spread on the spare bed with the windows open and the fan going. A week of air had lifted a little of the gray. It had not lifted the smell.
“This was on the line last Monday.”
He stood in the doorway with his cap against his chest.
“I thought it was a blanket,” he said. “From the fence. I thought you were drying a blanket.”
“It’s my mother’s wedding quilt. Her mother pieced it. Nineteen fifty-four.” I turned back the corner so he could read the floss. “It’s never been in a washing machine. It’s never been anywhere but a cedar chest and that clothesline.”
He bent and read it. Irene and Walter. Then, because I suppose he had to know, he lowered his face a few inches and breathed in.
He straightened up slowly.
“That’s my bread bags,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On Irene’s quilt. And I stood there and told you it was good for your sinuses.”
“You did.”
“Lord have mercy.” He shook his head. “Sandra, I’m sorry. I am. I’m not saying it because Bud came. I’m saying it because I just smelled it.”
“I know you are.”
“Can it be fixed?”
“There’s a woman in Norfolk who’ll try. By hand, in a tub. She wouldn’t promise on the smell, or on the pink.”
“What’s she charge?”
I hesitated. It is an uncomfortable thing to name a sum to an old man on a pension, in your own spare room.
But Doris had said a thing to me by her car that morning. She said, “Don’t you let him off the money, Sandra. It’s no kindness. A man who’s done wrong and isn’t allowed to pay for it has to carry it around the rest of his life.”
“Eighty-five dollars,” I said.
He had his wallet out before I finished the word. Four twenties and a five, counted onto the dresser, squared up with the side of his hand.
“If it runs over, you tell me.”
“I will.”
“And if she can’t get it out.” He stopped. “Well. I don’t know what a man does then.”
“Then it’ll be a quilt that’s been through something,” I said. “Same as the rest of us. It’ll still go on the line in May.”
We went back to the kitchen, and now he sat, and I poured him coffee and cut him a square of the coffee cake Doris had approved.
“There’s another piece to this,” I said. “You’ve got to do something with your trash.”
“Bud said the same. I’ll haul it to the transfer station, I guess.”
“That’s twenty miles round trip and they charge by the bag. Lyle, why’d you quit the pickup?”
He turned his cup a quarter turn.
“Thirty-one dollars a month for a fella who makes one bag a week. It seemed foolish. Joan handled the bills, and when I started handling them, I went down the list looking for foolish.”
“What if it was fifteen-fifty?”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve got a cart that’s never more than half full with Tom gone five days a week. You bring your bag over Wednesday night and drop it in mine. We split the bill. Thirty-one dollars, fifteen-fifty apiece.”
I could see his pride get up on its hind legs. I could also see him doing the arithmetic, because he is that kind of man.
“Fifteen-fifty is a hundred eighty-six a year,” he said.
“It is.”
“I quit in April. April to now is six months. I saved a hundred eighty-six dollars quitting.” He glanced down the hall. “And I just laid eighty-five of it on your dresser.”
“Leaves you a hundred and one ahead,” I said.
“Not counting a new barrel.”
“Not counting that.”
He snorted. Then he laughed, a real one this time, and rubbed his hand down his face.
“Joan would skin me,” he said. “A hundred and one dollars, and I smoked up Irene Novak’s wedding quilt to get it.”
“She’d have you write it in the checkbook under foolish.”
“She would.” He nodded. “Fifteen-fifty. I’ll bring it every month, ahead. And it’ll be my saving, too, come to think. You’ll be down to fifteen-fifty yourself.”
“I had thought of that.”
“I figured you had.”
He ate his cake. And then he said the thing I have thought about most since.
“Joan had one.”
“One what?”
“A quilt. Her mother made it for us in seventy-seven. Little six-sided pieces, all sewed into flowers. Yellow, mostly.”
“Grandmother’s Flower Garden.”
“That could be. She’d take it out, spring and fall. I never knew why. I thought she just liked to look at it.” He frowned. “It’s in the hall closet. It’s in one of those plastic zipper bags a bedspread comes in. It hasn’t been out since she died.”
“Lyle. It’s been shut up in plastic over a year?”
“Is that bad?”
“Cotton has to breathe. It’ll go musty and yellow at the folds. Mother said putting a quilt in plastic was like putting a cat in a mailbox.”
He looked stricken, and I was sorry I’d said it so sharp.
“I haven’t had that closet open,” he said quietly. “Her coats are in there.”
I reached over and put my hand on his sleeve.
“Saturday,” I said. “If it’s calm. You bring it over and we’ll put it on my line. Tom’s home. I’ll show you how it drapes.”
He nodded. He couldn’t quite manage more than that, and he didn’t need to.
Tom got his something to do.
He came in Friday, and Saturday morning at eight he was across the fence with a square of expanded metal he had cut and edged at the shop in Columbus on his lunch hour, because a burn barrel wants a screen and the ones at the farm store are flimsy. Bud Hagen came out in his own pickup with a good barrel from behind the fire hall, holes punched low for draft, and four cinder blocks to set it on.
I watched from the porch. Three men past sixty, moving a barrel.
They put it clear over on the far side of Lyle’s machine shed, by the old hog lot, where a south wind carries the smoke out over eighty acres of bean stubble and bothers nobody but the pheasants. Bud paced it off from the shed. Sixty feet. He paced it twice, and then Tom paced it, as if Bud’s feet might be a different size.
“Paper and brush,” I heard Bud say. “Calm day. You call me if you’re not sure, and I mean that, I’d rather have forty calls than one grass fire.”
“I’ll look north first, too,” Lyle said.
Nobody asked him what he meant. Tom glanced up at me on the porch.
About ten, Lyle went in his house and was gone a good while.
When he came out he had the plastic zipper bag in both arms, held out in front of him like something that might spill. He carried it around by the gate, the long way.
We opened it on my porch table. I will tell you the truth, I was afraid of what we’d find.
It was a little yellowed along two folds. It was musty. But the flowers were as bright as egg yolks, each one ringed in green, and every stitch was sound. On the back, in ballpoint that had gone brown, somebody had written Joan and Lyle, 1977, Love Mother.
And under the must there was another smell. I knew it before he did. Cherry almond hand lotion, the kind in the pink bottle. Joan kept it by her kitchen sink for forty years.
Lyle got it a second later.
He didn’t say a word. He picked up one corner of that quilt in his big cracked hands and held it against his face, and stood there on my porch with his shoulders going, and Tom and Bud both found something very interesting to look at out in the yard.
I waited until he was through. Then I took the other end.
“Two lines,” I said. “So the weight’s spread. Never pins. Shady side.”
We draped it together. He was careful as a man setting a hen. When it was up, lying in its hammock with the breeze just lifting the edge, he stood back and looked.
“How long?”
“Two hours. Then you turn it and give it one more.”
“And spring and fall.”
“Spring and fall. And out of that plastic. I’ve got an old cotton sheet you can wrap it in.”
“I’ll write it down,” he said. “I’ve started writing things down. I’ve got a tablet on the counter.” He hesitated. “I wrote down Mondays. It says, Sandra washes, look north.”
I took Mother’s quilt to Norfolk that Monday, on my day off, and I did no wash at all, which may be the first Monday in thirty-six years. The cleaner kept it two weeks. When I went back she laid it out on her long table and stood with her arms folded.
The smell was gone. I put my face right down to it. Clean cotton, and nothing else.
The pink had let go a little, in three of the rings on one side, a shade lighter than the rest. The bluebird patch was fine.
“I’m sorry about the pink,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “I know how it got that way, and I know who paid to fix it. That’s part of it now.”
It cost eighty-five dollars even. I put Lyle’s four twenties and his five on her counter.
It’s back in the cedar chest. In a few months it will smell like pencil shavings again.
The Wednesday after the barrel moved, there was an envelope tucked in my back screen door. Fifteen dollars in bills, and two quarters taped to an index card so they would not rattle loose. On the card, in a road man’s square printing, it said Trash, October, L. Becker.
And every Wednesday evening about dark, I hear the lid of my green cart go up and come down, one small bag, and his boots going back along the fence.
Last Saturday was calm, and warm for the season. I looked out my kitchen window while the coffee perked.
Lyle was standing in his yard, wetting one finger and holding it up, the way boys do. Then he turned and looked north, at my bare line, for a long careful moment.
Then he went back inside for something yellow, and came around by the gate.
