Seven hundred and twelve days. That was how long the blue can of Maxwell House coffee had sat in the pantry cabinet behind the canned peaches before I finally noticed the bottom of the tin was starting to rust a little around the rim. Robert always bought the big one at the feed store on Saturdays. He liked the blue can because he said the red ones were too modern. When he had his heart attack right there by the tractor shed, the house suddenly got so big it felt like it was echoing every time I dropped a fork on the linoleum.
I stopped answering the landline after the first three weeks because people kept asking if I needed anything, and I never had the breath to tell them I didn’t even know what I needed. The grass in the front yard grew up past the ankles of the metal deer Robert welded back in ’94, and every time I looked out the kitchen window at it, my stomach did a slow, sour drop. That was when I saw Leo walking down the county road with a rusty push mower rattling behind him like a tin can tied to a bumper.
He wasn’t much for talking, that boy. Seventeen years old, with dirt permanently ground into the creases of his knuckles and hair that looked like he combed it with a hurricane. I walked out to the edge of the caliche drive and asked him what he charged to knock down the weeds before the county sheriff sent me another yellow postcard about the fire hazard.
He looked down at his sneakers, scuffed gray things with gray tape holding the toes together, and said he could do it for twenty bucks. I told him twenty-five if he stayed out of my wife-hair irises along the porch foundation. He gave a short nod, pulled the cord on that old Briggs and Stratton engine until it coughed up a cloud of blue smoke, and went to work. I went back inside and sat down at the table with my cold tea, watching the dust motes dance in the shaft of sunlight coming through the window screen. I figured that would be the end of it. Just a transaction between a tired widow and a kid trying to buy gas for his rusted-out Ford pickup.
But the trash bins were the first thing that didn’t make sense. Every Tuesday evening, the county truck comes rattling down our road and kicks the empty plastic cans back into the ditch if the driver is having a bad day.
Robert used to go out in his slippers and drag them right back up the two hundred feet of gravel before the sun went down. Two weeks after Leo started mowing, I woke up at dawn to bring in the morning paper, and both green bins were sitting right there against the garage wall, clicked neatly into place. I didn’t think much of it at first. Maybe the wind blew them up, though the wind doesn’t usually push two heavy plastic tubs uphill against the slope of a driveway. Then came the bags of flour and the heavy jug of whole milk sitting on the cedar bench by the front door. I hadn’t asked for groceries. I hadn’t even been to town in six days because the power steering on my Buick was whining like a stuck pig. I opened the screen door and found a brown paper sack with two pounds of butter and a box of saltines, and I stood there for a long time with my hand on the wooden frame, wondering if the delivery driver had left them at the wrong house.
The porch light was the one that really got under my skin. The bulb had burned out back in November, right after the first hard freeze, and the glass globe had rusted fast into the brass socket so I couldn’t twist it loose. I’m too old to be standing on a wobbly three-legged stool with a pair of pliers, so I just left it dark. I liked the dark, mostly. It kept the world at arm’s length. But one Friday night around ten o’clock, I went to check the deadbolt before turning in, and when I flipped the wall switch by habit, the porch flooded with a bright, steady yellow glow that showed every speck of dust on the screen. I went outside in my nightgown, feeling the cool night air prickle my arms, and tried the brass fixture. It didn’t wiggle. Someone had scraped the rust out with a flathead screwdriver and put in a fresh sixty-watt bulb, wrapping the base with a little strip of electrical tape so it wouldn’t rattle in the wind. I looked out over the pasture toward the county road, but there wasn’t a soul in sight except for an owl sitting on the telephone wire.
By the time July rolled around, the heat out here in the Texas panhandle was thick enough to chew. The wind blew off the dry fields like an oven door opening up in your face. I started keeping a lookout around four in the afternoon on Thursdays because that was when Leo usually showed up with his mower. I watched him from behind the lace curtain in the parlor. He didn’t rush. He mowed the front and both sides, then the little patch behind the cistern where the Johnson grass grew thickest. And then he started doing things that weren’t on the bill. He took a hoe to the weeds around my mother’s old rose bushes, chopping them down with short, rhythmic strokes that didn’t miss a root. He picked up the dead cedar branches that had fallen during the spring storms and stacked them neatly against the woodpile by the shed.
I sat there in my rocking chair with a glass of tap water sweating through the plastic tumbler, feeling a strange, prickly heat behind my eyes that had nothing to do with the weather. Nobody had looked at my yard and seen what needed doing since Robert died. People brought casseroles for three weeks and then they went back to their own lives, which is how it’s supposed to be, I suppose. But Leo just kept showing up like clockwork, moving quietly through the heat with his gray shirt soaked dark across the shoulders.
The day it came to a head was a Tuesday when the temperature hit 104 before noon. I had baked a pan of cornbread because I had too much buttermilk in the fridge, and it sat on the stove cooling under a dish towel. When I heard the steady put-put of that old mower dying out by the pump house, I didn’t wait for him to finish packing his gear. I grabbed a cold jar of sweet tea and two glasses, pushed open the squeaky screen door, and walked straight out into the blinding white sunlight. Leo was wiping his forehead with the hem of his shirt, his chest heaving under the thin cotton. His skin was burnt the color of an old saddle, and his hair was plastered to his forehead with gray-brown dust. He looked up when my shadow fell over the mower deck, and his eyes went wide for a second, like a stray dog caught behind a chicken wire fence.
I didn’t smile, because I didn’t have one ready, but I held out the jar of tea and the glass. He took the glass with fingers that were black with grease around the nails, whispering a low thanks that got lost in the cicada noise from the mesquite trees. I stood there with my hands folded in my apron pockets, looking down at the worn tread of his work boots. I asked him why he kept doing all the extra stuff around the place when I only paid him for the grass. I told him I wasn’t running a charity house and I didn’t need anybody feeling sorry for me just because my husband was gone. My voice sounded harder than I meant it to, sharp like dry twigs snapping underfoot. I watched him swallow the tea too fast, his throat working hard against the cold. He looked down at the dirt between his boots for a long time, shifting his weight from one heel to the other, before he finally gave me the answer that stopped everything in my chest.
My mom used to struggle like this. I know how heavy small things can feel.
The words didn’t come out loud or theatrical. They just dropped into the space between us like a stone falling into a cistern. I stood there on the caliche gravel, staring at the patch of red clay on the toe of his shoe, and the silence stretched out so long I could hear the wind whining through the barbed wire fence down by the highway. I thought about his mother, a woman I’d seen twice at the post office with dark circles under her eyes and three kids hanging onto her coat like burrs. I thought about the way she drove that old station wagon with the mismatched doors, always looking like she was carrying the weight of the roof on her shoulders. Leo didn’t look at me when he said it. He just handed the empty glass back, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and reached down to pull the starter cord on his mower on the first try. The engine roared back to life, loud and ugly, breaking the spell right there in the yard. He didn’t say another word, just steered the machine around the corner of the house toward the back pasture where the sunflowers were going to seed.
That was three weeks ago. Things are different now around the place, though we still don’t talk much when he comes by on Thursdays. I started leaving a glass of iced tea and a wedge of cornbread on the little white table by the back door before he even gets out of his truck. He drinks the tea and eats the bread while he checks the oil on his mower, and sometimes he points out a rusted hinge on the storm cellar or tells me when the weather is fixing to turn bad from the west. I don’t feel quite so invisible when I look out the window anymore, and the blue can of coffee is finally empty, sitting out in the trash can by the drive where the green bins wait every Tuesday morning. The porch light stays on until midnight now, casting a steady, yellow circle over the floorboards where the old man used to sit, and tonight I left a fresh loaf of buttermilk bread on the bench for him to take home to his mother.
