Page 68 of Summer Lessons
“So are we really spending our Sunday cleaning out his backyard?”
“He says there’s blackberry bushes. I’m going to need you to go buy those Teflon gloves Dad uses for roses and two kinds of garden shears. I already texted Skipper about everybody wearing jeans and long shirts and waffle stompers and—”
Dane held up a hand. “Oh my God, calm down, Mason. You got the job! You’re the top dog organizer of the entire world, Mr. MBA. I’m just asking—what’s your endgame here?”
And Mason was proud, because they had one. “Help him clean up his mom’s house. Help him move out and be his own person.”
Dane regarded him steadily.
“Hope he comes back,” he conceded with a sigh.
“See?” Dane said, smugly superior. “Hope. It’s a fucking thing.”
Brambles and Brush
TERRY LEFTearly the next day, after a lingering kiss and an admonition for Mason to stay in bed for another hour. Mason had managed a half an hour before he pulled Dane out of bed and got them both ready so they could go to the hardware store and buy several sets of gloves, some clippers, and the super-strong garbage bags that wouldn’t puncture if you tried to shove a spear through the sides.
When they arrived at the tiny ramshackle house in Carmichael, Mason’s first thought was that Terry hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d talked about his mother’s backyard. There was a rotting wooden fence keeping the garden entropy from taking over the driveway, but the brambles and weeds were literally too thick to see through.
Mason seriously wondered about going back to Lowe’s and asking if they sold machetes.
Carpenter arrived, and he and Dane set Mason up with fleece blankets and a folding chair and those wonderful little hand-warmer things. Skip and Richie showed up about the same time Terry got back from taking his mom wherever he’d taken her. Terry had tried to explain where she was going, but he outlined a series of stops, from her friend’s house to church to the mall to somewhere else, to a place where someone would be who would drop her off at six. Mason didn’t follow it. Mostly he was glad she was gone.
Terry waved at everybody and then ran inside the house and came back wearing jeans—for once—and a long-sleeved denim shirt. He’d also tied his hair up in a bun, and as he came out of the house, he was sliding Mason’s stocking cap over it and pulling the warm blue wool over his ears.
He greeted Skip and Richie while Carpenter and Dane were still fussing with a way to prop Mason’s foot up so it didn’t hurt. When they were done, he walked over to Mason’s chair and copped a squat, grabbing one of the little chemical hand-warmer packets out of the box.
“So you break open the little pellets inside and they keep you warm?” he asked curiously.
Mason nodded and squeezed the ones inside his gloves. “Yup. Love them.”
Terry grinned, opened up a packet, and shoved it up under Mason’s shirt.
“Wha—”
He fiddled with Mason’s clothes for a moment, intense and searingly personal, and then settled the packet between Mason’s T-shirt and his sweatshirt, right over Mason’s heart.
“Gotta keep it warm,” he said, peering into Mason’s eyes with a twinkle in his own. “So it can keep on warming me up.”
Mason’s flush made up for the frigid gray fog that blanketed them all and the lack of even hope for the sun. “Just warm for you,” he promised.
Terry kissed his cheek again, then stood up and asked Skipper what they should do first.
Although Dane gave Mason crap about being a weenie and letting his friends do all the work, the truth was, the next couple of hours were hard to watch.
They started out one cut at a time, cutting the blackberry bushes and weeds that grew over the fence, and then worked their way through the next foot, and then the next one, and then the next one.
Richie and Terry kept up a blue streak of cursing as they filled up trash bags with brush, brambles, trash, old boards, newspapers, rusty garden implements, pots, birdcages, and the wooden leftovers of what might have been a chicken coop.
The gloves helped, but everybody—Carpenter, Dane, Terry, Skip, Richie—ended up with big scratches over their faces, and Mason turned out to have a job after all: first aid. He swabbed a lot of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin that day, and then taped gauze over the offended areas.
After two hours they had worked their way about halfway through the yard, and besides being both sweatyandfreezing, scratched, bleeding, and disheartened, they were also hungry—and running out of room.
The trash bags covered most of the driveway.
They paused for a moment and had a discussion about what to do next—nobody had a car big enough to haul—when a big pickup truck with extra rails built on for gardening implements pulled in front of the house and Cooper hopped out with Menendez by his side, because you never could have enough soccer buddies to help.
They made an unlikely pair—Menendez, small with curly dark hair and movements like a spring-loaded toy; and Cooper, tall, with broad shoulders and long limbs, as well as a wealth of thick reddish-brown hair he’d pulled back from his face into a ponytail. Mason had enjoyed playing soccer with both men, and he could tell from the suddenly alert, active cant to Terry’s shoulders that seeing them was a welcome surprise.
