“Because I didn’t know what else to do with him.” Her voice went thin. “Because I’d been on this street six weeks and not one person had said a word to me, and the first thing anybody did say was to keep my dog off their flowers. And I thought, well, fine. If that’s who I am here, that’s who I’ll be. I’ve got a smart mouth, Carolyn. It’s the only thing I got in the divorce.”
I sat there with that.
She was right, and it stung. When the Hayes family moved into that house in 1994, I was at their door before the truck was unloaded, with a ham loaf and a list of which nights the trash went out. When Vicki moved in, I watched from behind the curtain. I had not carried a dish to anybody’s door since Dale’s funeral. I had been taking them in, not sending them out.
“I should have come over in April,” I said. “With a pie. That’s on me, not you.”
“You’d just lost your husband.”
“Six months before. That’s no excuse for manners.”
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I’m sorry about the roses. I am. I just can’t make him go on rocks.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose anybody could.”
We sat. Jeff went by and lifted his two fingers. The light came up on the brick across the street and turned it the color of a peach.
“Tell me about him,” she said. “Your husband.”
So I did. I told her about the yardstick and the envelope and the eleven circles. I told her he measured the walk twice. I told her he sat on a bucket to plant that last one, the one she was sitting beside, and that I had pushed the dirt in around it myself.
She looked at the brown canes for a long time. She did not say anything at all. She reached down and laid her hand on the old dog’s side, and left it there.
The rest of that week she walked him the other direction, toward the Tuckers’, and carried him home, and came and sat with her coffee after. I kept sitting. I will be honest about why. By then I was not out there for the roses. I was out there because it was half past six and somebody was coming.
On Friday she bent over the Mister Lincoln and bent one of the brown canes with her finger. It snapped like a pencil.
“Is there something you can put on it?” she said. “Some kind of spray?”
“I don’t know. Dale would’ve asked Mr. Pruett. Out on the highway. He’s had that place forty years.”
She nodded. She did not say any more about it.
Saturday was the twentieth morning. She had her coffee with me and left early. A little before nine I heard her car back out.
I was on my knees deadheading the pink ones when she came back, close to ten. She pulled into her driveway and turned the engine off and then she just sat there behind the wheel. I could see her through the windshield. She sat long enough that I got up and brushed off my knees.
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.