"Death's not imminent, Vernon."
Vern stops raking and frowns a question at the Widow Edfors, his neighbour to the east. Wearing large white garden gloves, she loosens soil around the violets that edge her sidewalks, stopping now and then to shoo a gnat or pull a wayward foxtail. Vern limps back to herding leaves beneath his sprawling maple.
She doesn't interrupt her work, doesn't catch the silent query. "Just thought you might be worried," she says. "It's unavoidable, of course—but, this time, not real soon."
Vern leans the rake against the trunk. The August heat is irritating. So is the smallness of his lot. The absence of a fence. Being old. It might be easier if Edna still, at sixty-five, was not a picture in her shorts, kneeling, messing with her flowers. Say something, Vern. "Oh?"
She laughs. "Your tree. Those circles on the leaves? That's why they're falling early. It's just a fever, though. Not the end. Next spring, you'll see."
"Oh."
"Freddie's a surgeon." She laughs again. "Tree surgeon. Visited last weekend."
"Oh." The leaves, of course. No one else's tree is sick. He wishes he was grinning like a sophomore, saying, my, your flowers brighten up the neighbourhood. My, you're getting tan, Edna. My, you have a lovely laugh. If he only could. He wishes he'd called the nursery before he gave up hope, found out the chances for survival, not heard it from her silly nephew, Freddie.
"Be another scorcher, Vernon. Shame to lose that shade so early. It's a lovely tree. Afternoons, it keeps my porch so pleasant. We'll have it back next year. You'll see."
"Yes."
"You're raking almost every day now."
Vern says nothing. He looks away from her. He scowls at lawns as smooth as blankets stretched across a row of GI bunks. Before the war, he golfed on greens like that. As if they're, each one, cut and watered daily. Edged around the oriental shrubs and iris. As if things had to be unblemished before they were at all. He blinks.
Then he sees it. Two yards down--lying in the middle of a pool of grass so clean it might reflect the image of a person peering into it--a black splotched maple leaf. His. The only leaf outside his ragged, eye-sore lawn for as far as he can see. He winces.
"Would you like a glass of lemonade? It's fresh. You look like you could use a break?"
"I..."
He looks at her, catching just the bonnet tilting back toward the ground. Again he winces, this time from a sudden, sharp sensation in his leg, the leg that hasn't been there forty years, the leg that won't grow back next spring. A breath of humid air rustles through his pile, threatening to scatter it if he accepts the invitation.
"A lemonade?" he says.
"Should I bring it out? Or would you like to come inside? Your leaves won't disappear. Not likely, Vernon."