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.
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