I moved back to Maple Court with two suitcases, a dented push mower, and no plan beyond emptying my mother's house. She had been gone for seven months, yet her gardening gloves still waited on the basement steps as if she might come down for them. I told my brother I would paint the rooms, meet an agent, and leave before autumn. The neighborhood had other ideas. Every evening someone waved from a driveway, and every morning I found another memory attached to a porch.
Across the court, Walter Bell's grass had climbed past his ankles. Walter was eighty-two and proud enough to carry his groceries one orange at a time rather than accept a bag from anyone. I had known him as the man who fixed bicycle chains without being asked. Now he spent afternoons in a wicker chair, staring at a mower beneath a blue tarp. When I offered to cut the lawn, he said the machine had a temper and so did he.
The next Saturday was hot and windless. I finished my own narrow strip, then rolled my mower across the pavement before I could reconsider. Walter raised one hand from the porch. I could not tell whether it meant stop or hello, so I started along the fence. The work took forty minutes. I left the clover around his birdbath because bees crowded the white blossoms, and I trimmed carefully beside a wooden stake painted orange near the curb.
Walter met me at the sidewalk with two glasses of water. He did not thank me directly. He said my rows leaned left, then admitted the yard looked less tired. Before I went home, he pointed to the orange stake and asked whether I had moved it. I said no. His shoulders loosened, though I did not understand why. I had just stored the mower when a tan envelope slid from beneath its handle. My name was written on it in Walter's cramped block letters.