Clara stood over her stove stirring the bubbling pot of soup, thinking about the young man with the troubled eyes. He had been so kind to her, so concerned about her shaking hands, but there was a shadow about him, what Harold used to call a cloud of trouble. When they sat at the small table in the bistro he hadn’t had much to say about himself. He had asked her full name and where she lived and she had answered him with no fear that he might show up one day to rob her blind. Harold would have been appalled. But when she had asked him what he did for a living all he said was, “a little of this and a little of that,” changing the subject as fast as he could.
But her encounter with him had stirred something. It had given her a lift to be seen, to have been looked out for by a stranger. It had changed her, boosted her spirits. For the first time since Harold had passed she took her lunch out on the deck, sipping her soup in the warm sunshine. She listened to the birds and thought about the year they had visited Paris. She smiled as she remembered the flakey croissants, strong coffee and the melodic sound of softly spoken French words drifting through the evening breeze.
The next week she ventured out to the drug store to pick up some reading glasses, then took a cab to the library and checked out several books she had read when she was younger. She was older now. Maybe she would receive the words differently. It felt good to have something to look forward to. Revisiting the Yorkshire moors with Heathcliff, reentering the charged atmosphere of an Alabama courtroom with Scout, and lingering over the electric charge that always ran through her at the introduction of Phoebe into the dark and foreboding house of seven gables. The more she read the more her appetite returned.
Clara and Harold lived on an old neighborhood street three blocks from the main thoroughfare that led into the city. It was a street lined with 100 year old craftsman style houses with a broad porch across the front overlooking two square shaped yards divided by a sidewalk coming up from the street. In front of the porch were bedraggled flower beds. Harold had kept up the grounds before he got sick, but now it was a mess. Once or twice every summer one of the neighbors would show up and cut the grass without any explanation, but Clara knew that the reason sprang not from some altruistic impulse, but rather from the fact that her yard had become a neighborhood eyesore, which might bring down property values. Every year she would retrieve a half dozen landscaping advertisements taped to her front door. She had called one of them the year that Harold had passed. They wanted $75 dollars a month for their entry level plan. Clara had been mortified at the audacity of the price. So the grounds of the house she had lived in for over 40 years had fallen into disarray. The yard hadn’t been cut, the flower beds tended in months, and for reasons that were confusing to her, it suddenly mattered. Maybe it was the descriptions of the gardens in her old books. Perhaps it was all the time she was spending taking her meals outside looking out over the chaos of her back yard. Something was stirring in her soul, she knew not what.
Both of Vinny’s two ex-wives had moved away before the ink was even dry on the divorce papers, both to their old home towns, over an hour away, back to the comforts of home where they didn’t have to worry about running into him every time that ventured out. Vinny couldn’t blame them. He had been a horrible husband. The only part of his married life he could cling to as proof that he wasn’t a complete disaster was the fact that he had never once lifted a hand in anger to either of them. As an ex-husband, he had never missed a support payment, even when it meant a diet of Campbell’s soup, peanut butter-jelly sandwiches and the smelly city tap water that had the advantage of being relatively free. They had left because he had broken their hearts. Vinny had sown the wind and now was reaping the whirlwind. His inability to resist the sins of the flesh had cost him everything, including his self-respect. Which was why his encounter with Clara Parker had surprised him so.
In the first moments after he saw her spill her groceries across the parking lot he thought that he had finally found someone more miserable then he was. She had the facial expression and the halting, shaky movements of someone overwhelmed by the world and her tenuous place in it. But instead of fleeing her mess, there he was inserting himself into the middle of it. Maybe it was the tears streaming down her fragile cheeks, or the helplessness of her predicament. Whatever it was had stirred a long atrophied trace of compassion loose in his heart. There he was sitting with her, watching her eating her biscuit, listening to her talk about her dead husband, and watching the color return to her face. He had watched her slowly back her ancient, exhaust-belching Oldsmobile out of its space and drive agonizingly slow through the parking lot and finally disappear around the corner. He felt the odd sensation of warmth as soon as he started his truck. There came an inexplicable realization that he had just done something decent and good, that he had been of service to someone who needed help. In addition to the banishment of the aches and pains which had sent him on this errand in the first place, his encounter with Ms. Clara had brought with it the suggestion that somewhere within him lived a better man.
The very next Saturday morning Clara sat on her rocking chair, this time on the front porch, sipping her coffee and reading the last chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, when she heard a loud truck rumbling down the street towing a trailer jam packed with lawn mowers, gas cans and weed eaters. When it stopped in front of her house she concluded that the neighbors had finally had enough of the weeds in her yard.
Then she saw Vincent walking towards her on the side walk that split her yard in two. He tilted the brim of his baseball cap up enough to reveal his eyes. “Ms. Clara, I couldn’t help noticing that your yard is a hot mess. Thought maybe I could clean it up a bit, if that’s alright with you.”
Clara was temporarily speechless. The only thing she thought to say was the worst possible thing to say—“How much will it cost?” It came out even worse than it was, like all she cared about was money and not the fact that this bewildering young man was once again offering his assistance with a job that she was ill-equipped to handle by herself. Vinny saved her the embarrassment but answering quickly and with a smile. “Well, maybe you could fix me some lunch when I’m through.”
Clara spent the rest of the morning watching Vincent bringing her old gardens back to life, cutting the grass, trimming all the edges and gathering up all the dead weeds into large black bags. He worked slowly, deliberately, with the practiced skill of an expert. It was like watching the grounds travel back in time, back to when they were regularly cared for, back to a time when she had been cared for. By the time he was through his shirt was plastered front and back with sweat. She offered him a towel and told him that he would have to clean up in the half bath at the end of the hall before she would feed him. For the second time in two weeks Clara found herself at a small table sharing a meal with a virtual stranger.
She brought out freshly made BLT’s along with potato salad and a large coffee mug full of homemade sausage and lentil soup, along with a glass of iced tea. She watched him eat and tried to think of what to say. She was so grateful for him and his kindness but couldn’t summon words equal to the task. So, she ate her soup in silence.
Vincent had never tasted anything so good as the soup in the white coffee mug. For one thing, he was ravenously hungry. He hadn’t had a plate of food this generous in a very long time and he tried not to embarrass himself by wolfing it down like some kind of homeless vagrant at a soup kitchen. But the spicy warmth of the soup and the crispness of the bacon tasted like some kind of miracle. He looked across the table at Clara, wondered about the vagaries of fate which had brought him to this sun splashed deck on a Saturday morning as the smell of freshly mowed grass hung heavily in the air.
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