She let out her breath. She sounds just like Dale when she does that. “Then go over there and tell her off.”
“At half past six in the morning? Over a hedge? In my housecoat?”
“So what are you going to do?”
I did not know. I told her so, and we talked about the grandkids, and I hung up and put the dish towel over the oven handle.
I thought about it all weekend. I thought about it in church, which is not what church is for.
What I kept coming back to was a plain fact. A person will let her dog do nearly anything in an empty yard. But I had spent thirty years behind the counter at the license office, handing people numbers and telling them they had brought the wrong paper, and I knew something about people. Hardly anybody will do the rude thing with somebody sitting right there smiling at them.
Sunday evening I went out to the garage.
Dale had two lawn chairs hanging on nails on the back wall. They were the old kind, aluminum tubing with woven webbing, the kind that folds flat and pinches your finger. We bought them as a pair at the hardware store the summer Amy was in the fourth grade. His was the one with the arm he had mended with a stove bolt. Mine was the other one.
I took mine down. I wiped it off with a rag. I set it by the front door with my coffee mug on the seat so I would not have to think in the morning.
Monday I was up at a quarter to six. I filled the thermos. At twenty past six I carried that chair down the front step and along the walk, past ten rose bushes, and I unfolded it in the grass right at the end of the bed, beside the brown Mister Lincoln, about four feet from the sidewalk. I sat down. I poured my coffee.
It was a pretty morning. The light came in long and low between the houses. The pink ones were open and the red ones were open, and the dew was still on, and I could smell them.
At half past six on the dot, Vicki’s front door opened.
She came down her step looking at her phone. Biscuit came down beside her, one stair at a time, like a man with bad knees. They crossed the end of her yard. He put his nose down and started for the roses the way a horse starts for the barn.
Then Vicki looked up.
I have seen that face across a counter many times. It is the face of a person who has just been told the office closes at noon on Saturdays.
“Good morning, Vicki,” I said. “Good morning, Biscuit.”
She stopped. Biscuit did not. He went to the end of his leash and leaned.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Having my coffee.”
“Out here.”
“It’s the nicest spot in the yard.”
She looked at the chair. She looked at the mug in my two hands. She looked at my housecoat, which is pale blue and has been washed about four hundred times.
“Well,” she said.
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.