Accommodating Negatives
by Bill Vernon
Will Knox, age 83, opened his eyes but continued lying in his “warm nest,” as his mother had always called it. He knew that the silence and bright morning, the light enhanced with the sun’s reflection, meant snow was covering everything outside. Add to that hearing no morning traffic on the street meant the accumulation was so thick, the city plows were not yet scouring the streets nearby. They’d still be on the roadways by the Maintenance Facilities a mile away.
Will had gone to sleep with last evening’s forecast of bad weather on his mind, expecting more negatives to deal with today even though he’d been forever desiring spring warmth, flowers and migrating birds. Wishes, apparently, didn’t influence the future.
Well, so be it. Amen. He had no choice in regard to snowfall.
Then loud rapping on his front door broke the silence.
So early? Already somebody wanted him?
He checked the alarm and groaned: going on 10. That wasn’t early. It was late for him. He rose, put on his bathrobe, cinched it around his waist, hurried downstairs barefoot, and through a kitchen window looked out at the porch.
Of all people, standing in snow was the next door neighbor kid, who at that moment jerked the storm door ajar and banged on the inner door again, louder as if he were irritated.
Will tapped his fingertips on the pane, nodded and waved when the kid looked over.
In the other direction, Will read 20 degrees on the outdoor thermometer, shook his head at the thought, then trudged to the front door. Why was that disagreeable kid here?
Will jerked the inner door open, pushed the outer door open, then stuck his nose out far enough to smell the frigid air. “What is it, Jack? Something wrong at your house?”
xxx
Will was thinking, the kid’s parents might be hurt. There could be a fire at his house and the kid hadn’t been taught to call the fire department, despite being 13 years old. Maybe the furnace had quit and with the parents already away at work this late in the morning, the kid didn’t know what to do. Probably the parents had told the kid not to call them except at certain times—they were both teachers (the father elementary, the mother high school, in different suburban school systems). But why would the kid come to him and not contact another relative? His grandparents on both sides lived within a few miles at most.
Will had wondered if the kid’s parents were bringing up their child very well. Beware of a child raised by parents who were teachers. They might be able to control a class of 25, but seldom their own child. Will ought to know. He was an example himself, an ex-brat. He smiled ruefully remembering how often he had frustrated his teacher-parents. While listening to what this kid said, Will remembered himself as an almost feral child.
Will re-focused on the kid’s forced smile. “Did you say you’ll clean my drive?”
“I’ll get the snow off.” The kid pointed behind him.
A wood-handled yellow plastic shovel was standing straight up with the blade stuck in the snow. Plastic shovels didn’t scrape the sealant off the driveway tar as metal ones did. One of the few uses of plastic that Will approved of.
“Okay?” asked the kid.
“Are you skipping school?”
The kid grinned more naturally. “My school is closed today. You can inspect the job we do before you pay me.”
“We?”
“A couple friends are coming to help. We’ll do yours, then go to other houses. I came here first ’cause you’re so close.”
“So you’re in business.”
It seemed outlandish that this kid, whom he knew to be antisocial and inimical to adults, would want to do something useful, something Will himself had done at this kid’s age after snow storms. It seemed too normal for a kid who last year colored his hair blue, purple, then blond, also curling his hair as tightly as an afro. His natural hair color was brown.
“Yeah,” the kid said. “We’ll do it for forty dollars.”
“I always clear the drive myself, but let me think a minute.”
The kid’s price was cheap. Two months ago after December’s only snowfall, the tree-trimming outfit of his next door neighbor on the other side said they’d plow his driveway for $70, and that was with a self-propelled gas snow blower. Of course he’d refused the crooks and shoveled it himself as usual. The kid didn’t know he was offering a steal.
Will shivered, wished he’d put in his hearing aids, and said, “Did you say forty?”
The kid nodded.
“And you’ll do it right now?”
“Yeah. Two friends will be here in five minutes to help.”
“Okay, Jack. You got a deal. Now I’m going to get dressed and have breakfast.”
The boy grinned. “Great!”
xxx
Will sat at the kitchen table eating his 325 calories: a medium size Honeycrisp apple, a slice of seeds-and-nut bread smothered with smooth Skippy peanut butter and blackberry jam (with seeds), and a 12-ounce mug of instant coffee, steaming between him and the window he was looking through, watching the boy go down the driveway to Mulberry Street.
Seeing the boy start at one end and work to the other was gratifying. The kid was applying logic, probably beginning there to greet his helpers and divide up their labors. Will always started at the drive’s other end and cleaned from there out to the street. He liked to do the hardest part first, so he’d be fresh and strong at the narrow section between his house and the kid’s house, where thick bushes compressed the space for shoveled snow so much he had to push the snow down the drive past the width of his own house to its front for disposal there.
Which reminded Will: he’d told the kid’s parents back in August that he’d like to uproot those cedars, but they’d reacted with surprising hostility: Rebecca, the kid’s mother, said that the hedge made a privacy screen they’d “prefer” to keep. Jonathan, the father, said in an uppity teacher’s voice, that the plant’s real name was Arborvitae.
“That showed his real self,” Will said aloud, remembering several sarcastic replies he’d squelched then, but said now: “No kidding”; “You don’t say”; “Let me write that down so I remember it.” Actually, he knew the proper name, but these neighbors were from New York City and didn’t know that hereabouts people identified the plant as cedar, which it resembles. Teachers have a hard time not orating in conversations outside a classroom. But that was neither here nor there. Now their son would have to work hard to clear the snow off that narrow area.
Out by the street he saw the kid stab his shovel in the snow. Will remembered when the boy, concentrating on his cell phone as he walked, had bumped into Will, who even then had to say hi first to get a hi back. The kid seemed to avoid Will and was maybe like that with other adults. Like he didn’t fit in. Maybe he felt like an outsider because he attended not the local school, but a distant STEM school, which Will suspected did not foster social skills.
Noticing that the kid was lifting his loaded shovel awkwardly, Will for the first time realized that the boy was diminutive rather than big for his age. Three scoops of the shovel and he stood there as if resting, looking up Mulberry perhaps for his friends.
Will remembered last spring calling the police on the kid. One afternoon, when something had thudded against Will’s stucco house, he checked outside and found a heavy white ball lying on the drive near a damaged tail light on his purple 1968 Pontiac Bonneville. Carrying the ball, Will confronted the three boys he saw next door, each holding a lacrosse stick, told them about the damage, and asked which one was not careful and owed him for a new tail light?
Jack denied that they did it. They’d been aiming Lacrosse balls away from Will’s house, throwing them into a net. How could one hit his house? Then Jack acted smart-alecky, jumped around, laughed, said inane things, even literally ran in a circle around Will. Showing off for his friends. Will told them if they didn’t cooperate, he’d call the police. Fixing the damage would be expensive because his car was discontinued and old. When the kid’s friends walked off up Mulberry, Jack disappeared into the house and wouldn’t answer the door when Will rang its bell. Will assumed the parents weren’t home and called the cops.
The policeman who came was excellent. He gathered Jack and his three friends, who’d returned, on Will’s driveway, showed them the damage, and asked for facts. Jack admitted he did it. About then Jonathan and Rebecca returned home (Jack had called them). The cop even got Jack to apologize and taught all four boys a good lesson. The parents cooperated and immediately paid the $223.59 bill when Will gave them copies of receipts: from eBay for the parts and his mechanic, who did the work for only $50. It had been a satisfying experience except for Jack’s manic behavior, which seemed adolescent and disrespectful.
xxx
Downstairs after shaving, brushing his teeth, checking emails, and dressing, Will was surprised to see that clearing the drive had progressed slowly. It was just now approaching his house although the clock indicated that a half hour had passed since breakfast.
Only one other boy was with Jack, and the two were simultaneously shoveling snow off opposite sides of the drive, but Jack couldn’t keep up with his friend. He was slower, pushing the snow off the driveway, not lifting a loaded shovel as he’d done earlier. Returning to the middle of the drive to push more snow off, he’d talk to his friend and rest. The boys were passing the part of the drive under the big Norway spruce, the easiest area to clean because beneath its broad, thick limbs, less snow settled on the drive. Jack had been counting on another helper.
Will felt inspired, laid out a package of small marshmallows, and opened his garage door with the remote. While the milk heated, he pulled on his Amish knee-high farmer’s boots, put on his work coat, put in his hearing aids and donned his hat with the ear flaps up. He checked the stove was off, poured the hot chocolate into two insulated traveling cups, left off the caps to put marshmallows on top, and went through the front door taking the drinks out.
He said to the boys, “Take a break, Jack. You guys are doing great. Here you go.”
Will shook Tyler’s hand after Will had to drag a name from him to hear it. Then Will asked if he could use Jack’s shovel a second. With it, Will pushed a load of snow to the side. The snow was frozen underneath and still wet despite a fluffy surface. The blade of both boy’s shovel was flat, intended for lifting and throwing, not arched for pushing snow.
“That’s heavier than I thought,” Will said. “Is another friend coming to help?”
“Hal can’t make it,” Jack said. “His parents won’t let him ride his bike, and he lives four miles from here.”
“Well, yeah, riding a bike in this stuff would be dangerous. Listen, if you don’t mind, I’ll start at the other end by the garage and work toward you. I need a little exercise.”
He lifted his right foot and shook it. The snow was in fact up to Will’s ankles.
“You need a shovel?” Jack said. “I’ll get you one from our garage.”
Will smiled. A friendly and helpful Jack. “Thanks, but there’s three old ones with an arching blade in my garage. They’re best for pushing the snow. Use one of them if you want.”
xxx
Will went immediately to the back corner of his house and using one of his own shovels pushed snow down the middle of the driveway’s narrow part. He left the snow pile on the drive just past the front corner of the house except for a shovel-full that he threw on the front flower bed and another on the five-foot wide side yard by the kid’s property. Though neither boy borrowed one of Will’s arched shovels, when the boys reached the snow he’d piled, they followed his example, moving his piled snow off the drive. Then all three cleared snow off the narrow part and the twenty feet Will hadn’t touched between the back of his house and his garage. Will had deliberately not touched there before, as he’d intended to do originally, clearing the center of the narrow area to the boys’ work site instead, and that seemed to encourage them.
Will hung his shovel by the handle on a nail in his garage, gazed down the drive, and when the boys came over beside him, their shovels quiet, he pointed down the drive and said, “Wow. Look at that. We moved a lot of snow. I always feel proud finishing a difficult job that’s well done. Don’t worry about those little drabbles of snow. They’ll melt off by day’s end. How about another hot chocolate?”
Jack looked at his wristwatch, then Tyler, then said, “Can you pay us now. If we hurry we might find another driveway up the street to start cleaning before noon.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll go get the money. You can come in and warm up. There’s a mud room just through the side door.”
They stayed where they were as Will went inside and pondered the cash in his wallet. He’d been chastising himself for taking advantage of the kid’s naive price for cleaning the drive. Will had seen himself as a youth in both boys. They’d worked honestly and hard. Yet a selfish impulse told him to give them $40 and be done with it.
The boys were waiting on the driveway by the side door. Will, still sorting his paper money, said, “I’ve got two twenties. Are you splitting the loot? A twenty for each of you?”
“Okay,” Jack said.
“I’m putting a ten with each twenty too. You deserve it. Thanks very much for your help.”
Both boys thanked him and turned to leave, but Jack turned back around and stopped. “Can I ask you something? Is Wilfred your real name? I saw it on your mailbox.”
Will laughed. “Yep, that’s my legal name. Wilfred was my mother’s father’s name so I always blame her for it. Who’s ever heard of Wilfred? You ever met a Wilfred before?”
Smiling, Jack shook his head. “That’s not as bad as my name. I’m Jonathan Three and I blame my Dad. He’s Jonathan Two. His friends call him Jon. So I tell people to call me Jack.”
“Sounds like your father is proud of his heritage.” Will liked Jack’s curiosity. “Anyway, I’m Will. Call me that.”
Jack said, “I will, Will,” and all three laughed together.
Will closed his garage door and headed back inside for a hot chocolate, but he was thinking of the kid asking about his first name. Will had almost told them that his wife Martha, who’d passed from breast cancer 10 years before, had printed Wilfred on their mail box as a joke. He’d never get rid of the mailbox or erase the name. It reminded him of her every time he noticed it. But he hadn’t thought the kids would like such a story.
BIO
Bill Vernon spends time writing, hiking, folk dancing, and babysitting. His novel OLD TOWN (Five Star Mysteries, Thomson-Gale) connects the original inhabitants of southern Ohio with current residents. Other prose work of his has appeared in BRIGHT FLASH LITERARY REVIEW, FEED THE HOLY, LIVINA PRESS, and HALFWAY DOWN THE STAIRS.
