Chapter 2

Abby drove around trying to remember the directions to the house. The eviction notice had showed up on her door, and she had until the end of the month to find a place to live. The manager wanted her out regardless of whether or not she managed to come up with the rent money. He claimed that he had a waiting list of people who would pay the rent on time. The few single friends that she had couldn’t offer much help beyond a couch in their living room. She was desperate and didn’t know what else to try.

She wasn’t having much luck finding the house, but did spot him mowing a lawn. She pulled her little Nova over to the curb and honked the horn. When he looked over in her direction, she waved and got out of the car. He pushed the lawn mower to the edge of the lawn and then killed the engine. Once it was quiet enough to be heard, she said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” Jack replied trying to remember her name. To tell the truth, he was more than a little surprised to see her there.

Knowing that this wasn’t his house, she asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m mowing a couple of lawns to get some cash. There are a lot of widows in this neighborhood and I can usually talk them into paying me twenty bucks to mow their lawn,” Jack answered. He would get six or seven houses on a weekend. It would be enough money for gasoline, some food, and maybe to pay a bill or two. It wouldn’t pay for the electricity bill which was up around three hundred dollars.

“Ah,” Abby said thinking that men had it a lot easier than women sometimes. At least he wasn’t lazy. It didn’t dawn on her that she could probably do the same thing if she owned a lawnmower.

“I’ve got this one to finish and one more up the street to do before I’m done for the day,” Jack said. He shifted his shoulders trying to ease some of the tension out of them.

“Do you mind if I wait around for you to finish?” Abby asked licking her lips nervously.

“That’s fine with me, but it’ll take an hour or more for me to finish. You might be more comfortable waiting for me at the house,” Jack said.

Embarrassed, she said, “I don’t remember where your house is.”

“It is on the next street over. My truck is parked in the driveway,” Jack said gesturing in the direction of his house. He wished that he could remember her name.

“Okay, I’ll see you over there,” Abby said.

Jack watched her return to her car and drive off. He stood there for a minute saying, “Annie? No, that’s not it. Gabby? That’s not it. I wish I could remember her name.”

Abby found the house without much difficulty. Parking her car behind the truck, she got out and looked around the neighborhood. It was very quiet there compared to her apartment complex. She sat on the porch. Not for the first time she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She didn’t even know Jack. For all she knew, he could be a serial killer or a rapist.

The elderly woman from next door walked over and said, “He’s not home.”

“I know. He’s mowing a lawn on the next street over,” Abby replied finding it a little amusing that the neighbors kept track of what he was doing.

“I saw you over here the other night. Are you his girlfriend?” the elderly woman asked climbing the few steps to reach the porch.

Abby was pretty sure that in twenty minutes this old woman would know everything there was to know about her. She said, “No. I understood that he might have a room to rent.”

“Oh,” the woman said with a frown. She didn’t know what she thought about a woman renting a room from a single man. She said, “He’s a nice enough young man. He has had it kind of tough since the economy took a downturn.”

“Everyone has had it tough. It seems to me like the prices have gone up and the wages have gone down,” Abby said.

The elderly woman nodded her head and said, “My investments have lost half of their value over the past year. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to survive on what I have left. Social security doesn’t cover the bills. My electricity bill ate up half of my social security check last month.”

“Tell me about it,” Abby said.

The elderly woman said, “They keep talking about electric cars. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Electricity is more expensive than gasoline.”

“The way that gasoline is going up, that might not be true for much longer,” Abby said. She had put fifty dollars worth of gasoline in her little car that morning. Gasoline prices had dropped right after the election, but climbed right back up with the coming of summer.

The elderly woman took a seat in one of chairs on the porch and said, “I remember when gasoline was fifteen cents a gallon. For two dollars we could drive our car around all week. Of course, at that time a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today.”

“Fifteen cents a gallon. I can’t even imagine that,” Abby said wondering what it had been like in those days.

“I’m Claire.”

“I’m Abby.”

Settling into her chair as if she was there to stay for awhile, Claire said, “Things were a lot different in those days. My grandmother used to live with my parents when I was growing up. She didn’t have to worry about the stock market and greedy bastards stealing her retirement money. My mom and dad made sure that she had food to eat, a roof over her head, and they paid her medical bills.”

“People looked out for each other in those days,” Abby said.

Feeling alone and helpless before the onslaught of events that she was powerless to control, Claire said, “This garbage happening up on Wall Street is killing me. I’m afraid that one day I’ll be homeless. I think I’d kill myself before I would let myself be homeless at my age. One cold night out on the streets and I’d be dead anyway.”

“I heard about some jerk that headed a large company getting a fifty million dollar bonus even though the company went bankrupt. It just isn’t right,” Abby said.

“In my grandfather’s day, they would have called a man like that a thief and hung him from the nearest tree,” Claire said.

“We’re too civilized for that now,” Abby said shaking her head.

Claire said, “What is happening today isn’t civilized; it is immoral. Taking that money is just plain criminal.”

“You’re right,” Abby said.

Claire asked, “What do you do for a living?”

“I work in a nursing home,” Abby answered thinking that mentioning her career as a massage therapist wouldn’t go over too well with the elderly woman.

“Those are depressing places. I hope to God I don’t end up in one of those,” Claire said pleased to hear that the young woman was in a respectable profession.

“Same here,” Abby said. After working there for a few weeks, she really never wanted to end up in nursing home. The smell of the place nearly killed her every morning when she showed up to work.

Claire asked, “Do you like your job?”

“Not really. Like you said, it is a depressing place. There’s nothing glamorous about my job. About the only positive thing I can say about it is that I take care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” Abby said. The nursing home was a warehouse filled with people who were waiting to die. It would be even more depressing if they weren’t drugged to the gills.

“I guess I can understand that,” Claire said.

Abby said, “I’m curious about Jack. What can you tell me about him?”

Claire cocked her head and studied Abby for a few seconds. Finally, she said, “There was a time when a gentleman would mow the lawn of a widow for the simple reason that it was the polite thing for a neighbor to do. Of course, the widow woman would offer a dollar or two as a token of her appreciation.”

“Okay,” Abby said not quite following how that answered her question.

“It is not that way now. Nobody does anything for anybody without asking for money. Jack charges twenty dollars to mow a lawn and he only mows the lawns of the widows in the area. Now that seems a little high, but it is nothing compared to what a service would charge. Most of the services in this area charge five times that much,” Claire said. She didn’t want to mention that the town now wrote tickets out to homeowners who let their yards get out of control. It was just another way the town was raising money to cover expenses. Paying Jack twenty dollars to mow the lawn was a lot cheaper than the hundred dollar fine they would get.

“Oh,” Abby said. She hadn’t thought about how much Jack was charging. Now that Claire had brought it up, she realized that he was giving them quite a break.

“He’s not an old fashioned gentleman, but he is about the closest to being one of any young man that I know about,” Claire said. She wasn’t really saying anything particularly bad about Jack; she was commenting on the nature of modern times.

Abby studied Claire for a minute and asked, “What else does he do?”

Claire smiled and said, “He does go around the neighborhood when the weather’s bad to make sure that everyone is alright. There was one time when we had a pretty good snow and I was out of bread. He brought a quarter of a loaf of bread over before shoveling my drive.”

“So you’re telling me that he’s a nice guy,” Abby said.

“You never know with people. If you want to know if he’ll show up in your room one night demanding that you have sex with him, I can’t say. Folks are different in private then when they are in public. What I can say is that he is well mannered for these times and that he is polite in public,” Claire said.

Abby felt that there was something that Claire wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t know if it was something nice or not. She said, “That’s true. You never know about people.”

Claire looked around the porch and said, “He was really fixing up this place when he had a steadier job. You could tell that he took a great deal of pride in the house. He still does, but money is tight for him at the moment. They turned off his electricity a month ago because he couldn’t pay it.”

“He told me about that. You sound like you don’t approve,” Abby said.

“A man is supposed to be able to pay his bills,” Claire said a little more sharply than she had intended.

The values of fifty years ago didn’t seem to apply to the world of today. Back then a man who worked was assured of keeping his job. That wasn’t true today.

“That’s a whole lot easier said than done, today,” Abby said.

Claire looked a little embarrassed and said, “This year was the first time in my life that I ever had difficulty paying my bills. The property taxes on my house doubled, the electricity went through the roof, and then all of my investments went down the tubes. I tell you, I was absolutely mortified when I started getting past due notices in the mail on half of my bills. I might not exactly approve of a man having financial difficulties like that, but I understand a whole lot better now how that can happen.”

Abby said, “My rent went up three hundred dollars a month, the electricity nearly doubled, and the cost of getting to and from work went up by thirty percent. I was just barely getting by before that happened, but now...”

“Life is hard for a woman living alone,” Claire said realizing that Abby had just explained why she would consider moving in with Jack. Women had done worse things to survive bad times.

Abby said, “I think that life is hard ... period.”

“Do your parents help you out?” Claire asked.

Shaking her head, Abby said, “They are divorced. Mom is living with some guy and my Dad is off in another part of the country raising a second family. I’m pretty much on my own.”

“That’s a shame,” Claire said shaking her head. She studied the younger woman for a minute and then asked, “What will your boyfriend think of you moving in with some guy?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Abby said thinking that Claire was doing a marvelous job of unearthing everything there was to know about her. Knowing what was going to get asked next, she smiled and added, “I’ve never been married.”

“What was your last boyfriend like?”

Abby said, “He was a decent guy, but we just didn’t click. I don’t know why not, but there were times we’d look at each other wondering why we were together. When I couldn’t afford to go to the same places he wanted to go to, things just kind of dropped off to nothing.”

“That’s a shame,” Claire said. She thought about what Abby had said and then asked, “He expected you to pay your own way?”

“Sometimes. Some things are just too expensive for one person to pay for, today. Tickets to a baseball game run a hundred dollars a person,” Abby said shrugging her shoulders.

Claire shook her head and said, “Things sure are different from when I was a young girl. If a man ever expected me to pay my way, he was history. We just did less expensive things when we got together if he didn’t have money.”