“Twenty,” I said. The truth was I got paid five dollars a mow. I added: “Plus tips.”
“Well, how about that,” he said. “By any chance, are you hiring?”
I wanted to laugh, but I figured he’d know I was lying if I did.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve got trees coming in, is the thing. Big trees that’ll take up the whole yard. Half the cost is those guys coming in and prepping the land. I’m leaning on you for a discount. How’s fifty dollars for the project?”
Fifty dollars to a kid lands in that perfect range of inordinate yet fathomable, and has a lot of sway to make him do something without thinking too hard about it. I’d planned on continuing my negotiations, but the words “fifty dollars” spun me off my game. Immediately I agreed.
Mr. Reuter said his thanks and turned homeward. I finished unloading the mower’s bag, holding my breath as the loose dust and grass billowed out of the bin upon landing. I hooked the bag, infinitely lighter now, onto the mower again. From across the street, Mr. Reuter waved and smiled. Then he pulled on the red rope above his white head, lowering his garage door until it was shut.
Work hadn’t started. I hadn’t yet been paid a nickel. But already I felt it. That was the first time I sensed I owed him something.
III. SOME NOTES ON MY UNDERSTANDING OF ADULTS
Some children transcend their age with patience and understanding — an understanding that you have to go through this thing called childhood before anyone takes you seriously, before you’re empowered to drive change. I wasn’t one of those children. I was a child in every sense of the word, but mostly I was a child in that I felt nothing like a child.
At twelve, I felt both prepared for the simplicity of the average adulthood and eager to sense the nuances of a more complicated version, one I’d have much preferred to live. Already I’d divided those older than me into these two camps: Pester and Foster. These were actual lists I kept as a kid, written with red ink (“Pester”) and blue (“Foster”). And like all camps, they had their leaders.
Unfortunately for my parents, I’d placed them at the head of the Pester camp. Mom and Dad — full-time salespeople of clothing and furniture, respectively — would come home from work, make dinner, and speak exclusively in questions. They’d ask my sister and me about our days at school, what we had learned. Whenever we asked about their days at work, they’d say, “Work isn’t worth talking about.” I expected as much from Mom — like many immigrant mothers, she considered education and God the only worthwhile topics of conversation — but I kept hoping my dad would break. Once, when I said as much to him, he offered me a piece of advice. He said, “The greatest quality a person can have is to be a deep, genuine listener.”
I argued that if he never said anything about himself, I’d never have a chance to listen.
“Without even knowing it, you’re learning how to listen right now,” he said mystifyingly.
Eventually I gathered that he meant to compliment himself, that by speaking to my sister and me mostly in questions, by hardly ever telling us anything, he was showing us what a good listener looked like.
That’s when I put him at the top of my “Pester” list.
I should add that the “Pester”/“Foster” lists were always changing. Coach Vierra, my gym class teacher, fell from the good side to the bad after he issued me a demerit for spitting on the blacktop. (The sizzling effect was something to see.) My sister, Jean — sixteen and impossible, most days, to locate — found herself on different sides of the list all the time, depending on whether or not I saw her that week.
This is a long way of saying Mr. Reuter was different. After hearing my mother’s opinions of him (she’d spent some time reaching out to the former Mrs. Reuter, and had come back, like a journalist, with a version of the story), I’d put Mr. Reuter down in red ink, too. According to my mother’s vague commentary, after all, this was a selfish bully of a man we were talking about, “the king of cutting corners.” But then he hired me for that job. Aside from Jean — who, because she was my sister, hardly counted — Mr. Reuter was the only person who’d ever made the transition from Pester to Foster on that list of mine. I made it out to be — someone breaking a pattern like that — a big deal.
IV. INSTRUCTIONS & INSIGHTS FROM MR. REUTER
In the driveway, Mr. Reuter held out a shovel. He had one hand on it, arm outstretched toward me. His other arm rested akimbo on his waist. I took the shovel with both hands and let the metal hit the cement.
“Hey,” he said, “don’t let the spade touch anything it can’t dig out. That means anything but grass, dirt, and shit. Got it?”
I lifted the shovel and held it horizontal. “Got it,” I said.
He went over the plan. The house, like every grass-having house on our block, had two front lawns: a bigger one separated from a smaller one by a driveway. The bigger side was three times the size of the smaller one, about 170 square feet. What he wanted was for the entire smaller side to be dug out and turned. He was going to fill that small side with cement, to extend the width of his driveway by five or so feet. That would take me a day or two, tops, he said, and we’d start there. The next step in the plan was to dig out a circle — ten feet in diameter — from the bigger side of the lawn. To the best of my ability, I was supposed to center the circle in the yard. I’d have to measure it and mark it off somehow. Then I’d get to digging.
The job seemed more complicated than what I’d signed up for, what with all the calculations. I told him so.
He scoffed. “You think I was going to give you fifty bucks to turn grass into mud? The money is for the precision.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Fifty dollars wasn’t as much as people made it out to be.
“The problem here,” Mr. Reuter said, looking me in the eye, “is that you’re not used to being entrusted with things you could easily mess up. Is that true?”
It sounded true. I didn’t think too deeply about it, and said yes.
“It’s a shame. It’s the death of a young man, not being given the opportunity to earn trust. The opportunity, you know? Just that. It’s bigger than anything. Oh, you’ll find ways to make fifty bucks here and there. That’s not really what you want out of this. I can tell. It’s not every day you get the chance to point at something you’ve done and say, ‘I could have ruined the shit out of this, but I pulled it off.’ You don’t think I could’ve — if I really wanted to — done this myself? Hell, it would’ve saved me a lot of time, not to mention the fifty. But I see you mowing lawns around the neighborhood, itching to make your mark on something. Grass, though, it grows back quickly, doesn’t it? Not even a couple days later, all your work is invisible. It’s gone. You’re trying, and I give you credit for that. But this—” He grabbed the shovel’s handle between my hands. “—this is permanent. You’ll see.”
I asked if I could say something.
“Sure,” he said.
“I’ll do it for seventy-five.”
V. SOME REALITIES OF MY FIRST DAYS DIGGING
It took two full days of digging to finish the smaller side of the lawn. I didn’t really have a strategy. Starting in the middle, I stepped the shovel into the ground as far as I could (about two inches) and pulled. In layers, I moved back until I reached the perimeter.
Mr. Reuter spent most of the time inside the house. At the beginning of each day, he placed a full pitcher of water and a cup on an oil stain in the driveway. The first day, I drank all the water in a couple of hours. When I got thirsty again, I went to the front door and knocked. Mr. Reuter answered, holding the telephone to his ear with his shoulder, carrying the holder and its wires around with him. With a look of disappointment — his glasses seemed to sink lower the unhappier he got — he took the pitcher from me and said he’d bring more water out in a bit. I went back to work. He never showed up with more water. Some time later I took a break, crossed the street, and drank as much water as I could from home. In a strange way, I came back with a feeling that I’d failed. I hadn’t made that pitcher last, and had to run home for help. The next morning, when I saw that a full pitcher of water had once again been placed on the driveway, I made a point to drink nothing more.