Mrs. Abernathy had her purse open on her lap, and her hands were trembling so badly that the clasp rattled. She is the president of the homeowners association of our neighborhood in Raleigh, a woman of seventy with a silver bob and a red sweater, who has presided over eleven years of meetings about mailbox colors. I had never seen her anything but composed. She drew out a letter, written on yellow legal paper in a wandering hand, and held it with both of hers. She said, “Preston, I found this three weeks ago. It was taped inside the lid of the toolbox of Mr. Ellison.”
Preston stood by the fireplace with his eggnog. He is my brother in law, tall and tanned, with a silver watch and a voice that carries. He said, “Mrs. Abernathy, I am sure it can wait until after the holidays.” She said, “It cannot.” Her voice cracked. “Mr. Ellison died on the ninth of November. He was eighty three. He was a widower, and he lived alone on Hickory Lane. For eleven years, he had received a letter from the association every spring about the condition of his yard. He had a bad heart. He could not mow.”
She unfolded the letter. “He wrote this in October. He left it for whoever found it. It says, To the neighborhood. I have lived in this house for fifty one years. I buried my wife here. I never asked for anything, and I am not asking now. But I want to thank the young man from Lopez Landscaping who has mowed my lawn every Saturday for fourteen months and never once sent a bill. His name is Luis. I do not know his last name. He cut my grass, and he sat on my porch, and he talked to me.”
Kindness given freely to a lonely old man is quietly written down somewhere, and it will be read aloud at the time it is most needed.
My son was standing by the Christmas tree, holding a plate of tamales. He had gone as red as the sweater of Mrs. Abernathy. He said, quietly, “Mrs. Abernathy, you do not have to read that.” She said, “I do, Luis. I have been carrying it for three weeks.” She kept reading. The old man wrote that he had no children, that his wife had been dead for nine years, and that the days had grown very long. He wrote that on Saturdays he heard the mower start up at nine, and that he began to dress for it. He wrote, I put on a clean shirt, as if for company.
She read another line, and her voice broke. “It says, I want him to have the house.” A sound went through the room. the mouth of Preston fell open. Mrs. Abernathy said, “It is in a will, Preston. A real one, signed in September, witnessed by his lawyer and his doctor. I have the lawyer here tonight, in the kitchen. He drove up from Wilmington. Mr. Ellison left the house, the lot, and sixty thousand dollars in savings to Luis Ortega, with one request. That he keep the maple tree in the front, because his wife planted it.”
I looked at my son. Luis was holding a tamale, half unwrapped, and he looked like a boy who had been hit by a small, kind truck. He said, “I never knew.” Mrs. Abernathy said, “I know you did not.” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “That is why he trusted you. A man who is paid to be kind is a good worker. A man who is kind for nothing is something else.” She turned to Preston, who was standing very still. “Preston, I understand you had your eye on that lot.”
Preston did not answer. It was true. I had heard it at supper, months earlier. He had made an offer on the lot of Mr. Ellison through an agent, a lowball, in hopes the old man would sell. He wanted to tear down the house and build four more of his gated townhomes on the street. It had been a sore point with the old man. Mrs. Abernathy said, “The lot is not for sale, Preston. It will not be. And as president of the association, I am delighted to confirm that the property is hereby exempt from all yard violations, forever.”
There was a stunned silence. And then, from the back of the room, the sound of my father, an old Cuban who rarely speaks in public, clapping once, twice, three times. Then my mother, then my cousins, and finally the whole family. Preston looked around the room as though searching for a door. Finally he took a breath and walked across to my son and held out his hand. He said, “Luis. I owe you an apology. And a handshake.” Luis shook it. He said, “Merry Christmas, Uncle Preston.” That was all.
We walked over to the house on Hickory Lane the next morning, my son and I. It was a small brick bungalow with a screened porch and a maple tree as big as a barn. Inside, it smelled of pipe smoke and old books. On the porch there were two chairs, and between them a little table with a checkerboard still set up for a game. Luis stood looking at it for a long time. He said, “He used to beat me every Saturday.” Then he sat down in the chair, and I sat in the other, and neither of us said anything.
He moved his company into the garage the next spring, with a small sign by the door. He did not change the house. He kept the checkerboard on the porch and the maple in the yard. On Saturdays the crew of Luis still mows the lawns of the old and the sick on the street, free of charge, and in the afternoon they sit on the porch and have lemonade. A new plaque by the front door reads, Ellison Lawn and Garden. Founded by a neighbor who said thank you in the only way he could.
