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.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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