“It’s only fertilizer, Carolyn.”
She said it over her shoulder, the way you would tell a child the shot would not hurt.
It was half past six on a Friday morning in the first week of June, and I was standing on my own front step in my housecoat with the newspaper in my hand. Vicki Sloan was standing on my front walk in a pair of gray sweatpants. Between us, with all four feet planted in the cypress mulch of my late husband’s rose bed, was her beagle.
He was an old dog, white in the face, with a back that swayed a little in the middle. He looked at me. He was not embarrassed. He finished what he had come to do, at the foot of the last rose bush before the sidewalk, in the very same spot as the morning before and the morning before that.
“That is the third time I’ve asked you,” I said.
“I know it is.” She gave the leash a little shake. “And I’m telling you, people pay good money for manure. You’re getting it free. Come on, Biscuit.”
Biscuit stepped out of the bed one stiff leg at a time and they went back up the sidewalk to her house, which is forty feet from mine. She did not look back. He did, once.
I stood there a while with the paper. Then I went and got the trowel and the bread sack I had started keeping by the door, and I cleaned up after a dog that was not mine, and I looked at that last bush.
It was a Mister Lincoln. The canes were brown from the ground to about the height of my hand, and the bottom leaves had gone yellow and dropped. In the first week of June, a rose ought to be the greenest thing in the yard.
I want to tell you about those roses, because otherwise I am only a woman fussing over a flower bed.
My husband Dale was not a gardener. He was a brick man. He put in twenty-one years at the brick plant here in Mexico, Missouri, until it shut down, and then he kept the boilers and the buses running for the school district until he retired. Every house on our street is brick, small and square and red, because half the men who built them worked at the plant and could get seconds cheap. Dale could tell you what was wrong with a furnace from the sound it made. He could not have told you a petunia from a pansy.
In March of last year the doctor in Columbia told us what the trouble in his side was, and how long that kind of trouble generally takes.
In April, Dale went out to the front walk with a yardstick.
I watched him from the window. He measured the walk from the porch step to the sidewalk, and he wrote on the back of an envelope, and he measured it again, because he never trusted a number he had only taken once. Thirty-six feet. He came in and showed me the envelope. He had drawn the walk as a long box, and down one side of it he had made eleven little circles.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.