PART 1 — TWO CARS
Jory is twelve and he has never done one thing in his life because somebody told him to, which cuts both ways.
Four days into the summer he saw Birdie Almond trying to get her mower round her own front lawn in about thirty-four degrees. She is eighty-one. He went over and finished it and would not take the ten dollars she tried to put in his hand.
Then he came in and said, “Mum, there’s probably loads of them round here who can’t do it.”
And that was his summer.
Two mornings a week, our old push mower up and down Pellow Drive and round onto Kellet Row, doing lawns for people in their seventies and eighties who cannot get out behind a mower in July.
He never took a dollar. Not once, and about six of them tried.
He is not a perfect child. He is twelve and he is rude to me about three times a week and he broke a window in April.
But I watched him spend his holidays on that, and I have thought about it a lot since, and I do not think I have ever been prouder of anything in my life.
Then on the Thursday before school went back he went out to do one last lawn.
He came in about an hour later, put the mower in the garage, and got a drink out of the fridge, and everything was completely normal.
And then two patrol cars came up the street and stopped outside my house.
Two of them. Not one.
Two officers got out and neither of them was smiling and they came straight up my path.
I opened the door with a tea towel over my shoulder.
“Ma’am, is your son the boy who’s been mowing lawns round here?”
I had no idea what was happening. I could feel my own pulse in my neck.
“Yes. Why?”
I called him. And Jory came round the corner from the kitchen with a glass in his hand, and both of those officers stopped looking at me and looked at him.
And the one on the left said:
“Son. Were you at fourteen Pellow Drive this morning?”
And my son said, “Yes.”
PART 2 — THE LIST
Eleven days before that, there was a residents’ meeting at the community hall. About twenty-five of us.
I had a list.
Jory had started it himself in July, in a school exercise book, because he kept forgetting whose was due. Eleven names, house numbers, and a tick for each fortnight.
I brought it because Birdie Almond had asked me to, so the committee could see there was no money in it and nobody had to feel funny about asking.
I got it out under any other business.
And Corwin Vale stood up and came down the side of the hall and took it out of my hand.
He is sixty-one and he is on the committee and he has lived on that street longer than anybody.
He did not snatch it. He took it, folded it in half, and put it in his own jacket pocket.
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