You Only Get Letters from Jail Read online

  “So?” she said. I shifted my weight and scratched a place on my cheek that did not itch. “You want some coffee?”

  I thought about it for a second. The agreement was that I would work for her from eight to five every Saturday and Sunday until the time was served. “It’s a good lesson for you, Marty,” my dad had said. “And it’s a good gesture. She lives by herself. She needs the help.”

  “I don’t know how yard work is going to pay her back for her dead cat,” I had said. “I mean, the last time I checked, you can’t mow some lawns and bring back grandma if she dies.”

  “Keep at it, Marty,” my father had said. “You want to make it six weeks?”

  So the deal was nine hours a day, Saturday and Sunday, all the way into April. It was about serving the time, not the amount of work I got done, and the way I figured it, if she wanted to offer me a cup of coffee, that big loud clock ticking off the minutes was reminding me that for every tick and sip, it was less time I had to haul and scrape and hammer and cut.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like a cup of coffee. That would be great.”

  She led me into her kitchen and there was a small table under a window and the room was full of early morning sunshine that was already warm, and I could smell cinnamon and baked sugar, and the table was set with two cups painted with little blue designs, and there was a pot of coffee on a beaded potholder and a white cream pitcher and a cup with sugar and little silver spoons. She pointed me toward a chair and she went to the oven and lowered the door and pulled out a braided loaf of bread, and she set it on the counter while she drizzled icing over the top and then cut it into thick slices, and I could see steam rise out of the bread each time the knife pulled away from it.

  “I hope you don’t mind raisins,” she said.

  She took a slice of the bread and lifted it onto a blue painted plate that matched the cups and the saucers, and she drizzled more icing over it and set it in front of me and then took the other empty chair at the table and poured coffee into each cup. When she was finished, she lifted her coffee, sipped at it, added a spoonful of sugar, and then sat back and stared at me. I realized that I had never sat in a stranger’s house by myself, never sat and eaten food in front of someone I did not know without the presence of my parents or a friend from school. I had never been alone with a stranger in a stranger’s house, and I wasn’t sure what to do with my coffee other than to just drink it even though it tasted hot and too bitter, but the thought of adding things to it and having her watch me seemed like too much to go through.

  “You don’t want cream?” she said.

  “It’s good,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “That bread was my mother’s recipe,” she said. “It was my favorite when I was a girl.”

  I picked up a small silver fork and held it in my hand, unsure whether I should cut off a piece and take a bite, or drink the coffee, or just pick up the slice of bread and eat it that way. I realized I was sweating and for the first time in my life I couldn’t wait to go outside and work.

  “Don’t be nervous,” she said.

  I swallowed a too-hot mouthful of coffee and followed it up with another one. “What should I do today?” I asked.

  She reached out and before I could pull my hand back or pretend I was cutting into the bread on the plate, her hand was over mine, and it was dry and warm and light. “You haven’t even had some food and finished your coffee yet,” she said. “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  In the other room I could hear the clock ticking, tight and hollow and solid, as the sun filled the room. I felt sleepy and wished I was spending this Saturday morning like I had spent the last one—warm in bed, wasting time, surfacing at some point past noon when I got too hungry to sleep. Instead, here I was eating a stranger’s cinnamon bread and drinking black coffee and sweating. On the floor in the corner was a small plastic dish of water, and I realized it was a cat’s dish, Toby’s, and it was still there, still full of water, waiting for the cat that would not come. I wondered if it was the same water that had been in it when he had died, or if she had changed the water since then, refilled it with fresh water out of habit.

  “I’m really sorry about Toby,” I said. “Really.”

  “Who?” she said.

  In the other room the clock began to chime and it went on for a full ten seconds while it played out the half hour, and I knew that if I had to hear that much noise every thirty minutes I would chop the clock to pieces and burn it up within an hour.

  “Your cat,” I said. “Toby. I’m sorry.”

  Marianne poured more coffee into her cup and followed it with cream. “Oh,” she said without looking at me. “I know.”

  I ate quickly and she offered me more but I wanted out of that sunny kitchen, out from under her staring at me. She finally walked me to her backyard and showed me the project for the day. I immediately wished that I had milked more time with a second piece of too-sweet bread and another awkward cup of coffee. Her yard was at least three feet high in overgrowth—grass gone to seed that had withstood the winter and was committed to its takeover; vines crawling over anything that stood still—a birdbath in the corner, decorative rocks, the walls of the house; rosebushes reaching out from the perimeter of the fence; trees, bushes, shrubs. The entire thing looked as if it belonged in a South American movie scene—something from Romancing the Stone.

  “I guess you can start here,” she said. “This will probably take you most of the day.”

  This will take me most of my life, I thought. “Okay,” I said.

  She pointed me toward a shed that had yard tools in it, and after wrestling the door from the grips of the grass and vines, I was able to go inside and figure out what to use and where to start. I was hoping she might disappear back into the house and her bread and her smells and her clock, but instead she just made her way to the elevated cement slab attached to her back door, where the grass had to relent its march, pulled a wicker chair forward, and sat down to watch me work.

  When I saw the first snake, I was grateful I had started with the lawn mower. The grass was so high that the lawn mower kept getting bogged down and I had to push it forward and backward, forward and backward in a rocking motion until it could chew through the grass and take on the next section. When it nudged the snake free and sent it sidewinding into the deeper grass, I was thankful for the noise of the motor because I was pretty sure I had let out a small scream, and I hoped Marianne hadn’t heard. I felt all of the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and a shiver of disgust ran up my arms and slid down my back with the sweat. I hated snakes.

  The sun was high in the sky and it felt as if the spring that had been holding its breath had finally exhaled and we were going to take a quick jump over spring and land somewhere in the middle of summer. After two more push-and-pull paths with the lawn mower, an entire tangle of snakes scattered in front of me and the blade caught a small one that hadn’t made the quick decision to go forward and right and instead had gone back and left and there was a thick sound from the lawn mower, the churning of the snake, and then it was spit into the grass beside me, the yellow and black stripes now ragged and red. I looked away quickly and pushed the lever down on the handle and the yard went quiet. There was sweat under both of my armpits and I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and walked toward the fence, careful to take only the path that was mowed and not the deeper grass, where the snakes had retreated. I didn’t even want my shoes to touch the ground.

  I hung my sweatshirt on the fence. “You have snakes back here,” I said.

  Marianne shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun. “Water snakes, I know. They love that deep grass.” She didn’t seem the least bit upset by it. Of all days to forget to wear my watch, today was the worst and I had no idea what time it was or how much time was left. I looked up at the angle of the sun and wished I had been a Boy Scout and knew things like how to tell time by the level of the sun or how to rid a lawn of snakes before mowing them down. The one I
had hit was sitting on top of the fresh grass.

  “I accidentally ran over one,” I said.

  Marianne stood from her chair and looked down at the grass where I was pointing. She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “The casualties keep adding up,” she said.

  I lifted the collar of my T-shirt and rubbed the sweat from my face. I could feel pieces of grass sticking to me. Everything smelled green and wet and alive. I was suddenly thirsty but I didn’t think it was a good time to ask for anything.

  I heard the back door slam and I figured I had finally done enough to piss her off and make her retreat, and in a way I was sorry it had to be over a dead snake, but I wasn’t that sorry. I wouldn’t be sorry if I ran over all of them, and if she wasn’t sitting back there watching me, maybe I would. Just rake up all the shredded bodies with the grass clippings, bag them, and put them at the curb.

  I went back to the lawn mower, pushed the lever, and was just about to pull the cord when the back door opened and I looked up and Marianne was standing there with two green bottles in her hand. “You look thirsty,” she said. “Take a break.”

  I went to the cement slab and she handed me one of the green bottles. There was no label on it, no identification. It was just dark green and full and cold. I looked down at it and tried to guess the contents by the color.

  “It’s beer,” she said. “You like beer, don’t you?”

  For a second I thought it was a test—something to see just how far I would go, but she had already sat back down in her chair and was sipping from her own bottle while staring out across the half-mowed lawn, and not looking at me at all. I took a small sip. It didn’t taste much like beer, at least not any that I had ever drank, but maybe it was imported.

  “My husband brewed it,” she said. “What do you think?”

  I took another swallow, this one bigger, and it felt good going down, cold and a little spicy, something like tea. “It doesn’t taste like beer,” I said.

  “Cardamom,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Cardamom. He liked spices. I’m more like you, though. I like herbs.” She gave me a knowing look. I had one of Elbow Ritchie’s joints of perfection tucked into the front pocket of my jeans.

  “Where is your husband?” I said. “My dad said you lived alone.” The beer was going down easily and I was down to half a bottle in another swallow.

  “He died,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

  I wished there was a label on the bottle and I could pick at it, fixate on it, do something so that I didn’t have to look at her and apologize, but I was out of luck and the glass was smooth green, the same color as the lawn, and I watched a trail of ants wander into a crevice in the cement. “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. In the movies they always say, “What happened?” and then there is an awkward and personal moment when maybe too much has been said but there is always some kind of relief in the telling of the story. I didn’t ask her that question.

  “You want another one?” she asked, gesturing toward my bottle.

  I nodded.

  We drank the next one in silence, and by then the sweat had dried from my back and the sun had shifted and the wedge of shade that held the cement porch had pulled back and slipped down to the grass. I looked at her from the corners of my eyes, saw the way her hair was so black that it threw off its own glare, and I could remember how in science class we had learned that on the visible color spectrum, darker colors absorb rather than reflect, but her hair was breaking that truth. I could feel my shoulders tightening up and the thought of dragging that mower around the rest of the snake habitat made my arms ache. My Converse were grass stained and my ankles itched.

  “Why don’t we go inside,” she said. “It’s actually getting to be hot out here.”

  “I should finish the yard,” I said. The two empty bottles sat beside me on the cement and I could hear other lawn mowers in the neighborhood, the Saturday chorus, and I knew that with the sudden warmth there would be hoses running and cars being washed and phone calls for impromptu barbecues.

  “I have been in a battle with Mother Nature for many years, Marty. She always wins.”

  She stood up and opened the door and waited for me. I picked up my bottles and went in.

  The kitchen was warm but not uncomfortable, and at some point she had cleared the table because the coffee cups were gone and I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down at the table and folded my hands in front of me. She stepped into the utility room, and I heard a refrigerator door open and then she was back with two more beers. My head felt a little fuzzy from drinking and I figured it was because I wasn’t used to working outside. Me and Elbow could put away a twelve-pack together without so much as a stuttered step and I was only on two and already buzzed. I had to remind myself to drink slowly.

  “It’s the worst kind of sun out there,” she said. “It’s when the sun is hot but the air is cold that people get sunburned. You don’t feel the heat, but it’s there—it’s just not how it appears and you think if you’re not too hot, then you’re not getting burned. Then you come in out of the sun and find out you were wrong. You look a little red, Marty.”

  “This beer tastes different,” I said.

  “Comfrey,” she said. “He was always experimenting.”

  “It’s not bad,” I said.

  “He died in a car accident,” she said. She had taken the other chair at the table and she was watching me drink. “He swerved to avoid something in the road. An animal, a piece of something—no one knows—it was dark and he was on a back road coming home from one of his trips. He liked to disappear sometimes. Drive to nowhere.”

  The table was made out of grainy wood, natural looking, and I could see small knots in it, trace the raised grain with my finger.

  “He left me a lot of money,” she said. “I have shoe boxes full of it in my closet.”

  I looked up at her. She met my eyes and I didn’t pull away. I took a long swallow from the bottle.

  “I didn’t need your friend’s money,” she said. “When he showed up here with that girl, I had already given him two choices, but I knew which one he would take.”

  Elbow hadn’t told me anything about this. What he’d told me was that Marianne had called his house that night after we hit the cat, and his dad had offered her money, made a deal, and paid her off the next morning. He never said anything about going over there himself, and he sure as shit didn’t say anything about bringing a girl. I looked at her like I didn’t believe a fucking word she said.

  “Oh he came up my driveway in his loud car and that girl was with him and he practically shoved the money in my hands. I’d told him on the phone that he could work one Saturday with you, do those things for me, and that would be enough of a gesture of apology—that’s what it’s about, isn’t it. A gesture. A show of remorse. One day of work and the both of you would be free from obligation.” She stood up and opened the back door. The smell of cut lawn was thick and heavy and sweet.

  “Or he could pay me one hundred dollars for every weekend he chose not to work and you did the work instead. And he came here, handed me the money. Three one-hundred-dollar bills and that girl holding on to his arm and giving me a look.”

  “What girl?” I asked.

  “The skinny girl. He should let me have her for a month. I could fatten her up.”

  “Did she have kind of dirty blond hair?” I asked. “Kind of tall, with pretty lips?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Kind of tall with pretty lips.”

  Elbow Ritchie had brought Alyson with him. Alyson had three classes with me—history, English, and biology—and I knew every freckle on her arms and the way she wore her hair depending on the mood she was in and one drunken Friday night right after Elbow got his car I told him that I was going to ask Alyson to prom because the only thing I wanted to remember senior year by was ending it with her.

  I felt hot suddenly, cold and hot, and when I
reached out to take a drink from my beer, my hand couldn’t close around it and I knocked it on its rounded edge, and for one quick second I thought it might regain its balance but it tipped and spun and everything that was left in it spilled out across the table and into my lap. I just sat there and let it, didn’t even make the attempt to jump back, move, avoid what was happening.

  “I knew that was the choice he would make,” Marianne said. “I knew you were different. I could tell that even before he stopped the car that day.”

  My jeans were soaked in the front and everything smelled like strange flowers and the heavy grass and I realized that all I had eaten was that thick slice of sweet bread and my stomach did a slow turn and I stood up and asked Marianne where the bathroom was and she pointed me down a hallway and I was gone.

  I ran cold water into the sink and rinsed off my face and small flecks of grass fell into the water that was pooling around the drain. The cold water made me feel better and I was able to breathe again, and breathing made my stomach drop out of my throat and I knew I was going to be okay. Elbow would explain. It had to be getting late. I could finish up the day here and walk to his house and knock on his door and just say, “Hey, you know what that lady told me?” and I knew he would say, “Man, Marty, not only is she a bitch, but she’s a crazy fucking liar, too. Let’s egg her house tonight” and everything would be okay.

  “Marty, is everything all right in there?” Her voice was close against the door and I tried to picture her on the other side, maybe leaning against it, maybe pressing her ear against the wood to hear if I was sick or crying or still alive.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and I thought maybe I would have to convince myself of that fact, but I realized that I was. I was just fine.

  “I brought you a change of jeans,” she said. “You can’t go home smelling like beer. I don’t think your parents would be too happy about that. Why don’t you just open the door a crack and I can hand them in to you.”