Always you waited until the hottest part of the day to mow the lawn. You never let it grow more than an inch. Sometimes Randall and I caught you picking wedgies from your shorts, which split up the side of your thigh, revealing where your leg hair tapered off. From across the yard, you looked like my dad; tall, pale and not terribly out of shape. Randall’s dad was even taller. So Randall said.

Now that I’m a man, now that I work long hours during the summer instead of playing endless games of Wiffle Ball, now that I live a couple of hours away, now that your shorts don’t strike me as being so short, now that you hire the Thomure boy from across the street to mow your lawn, I feel I owe you an apology.

If Randall were around, he would disagree. He’d claim you were a grown man and knew what you were doing. You even had a boy of your own—so my dad said—and he must have been quite ashamed of you—so Randall said. Your son was so ashamed that he dropped out of school and said yes to drugs and hung around the ratty part of town between the laundromat and the convenience store, a dented up bike between his legs and a couple of cigarettes in his mouth until eventually he disappeared. So Randall said. You were ashamed of him because he didn’t look enough like you. Too ashamed to let him inside your house to rest and hydrate. Shoo shoo, get get, as if he were a stray, rabid cat. You hung him out to dry. But he’s lucky he got away. So Randall said. Just imagine what goes on in there. You even had a wife somewhere, so my dad said, perhaps somewhere in that house of yours, but we had no way of knowing. Randall said your boy didn’t look like your wife either, and so something had to give. All we really knew was what we saw, which was you mowing the lawn, sometimes straight across and sometimes diagonally, sweat rolling down your bare back and collecting at the waist. On occasion, one of us would slug a Wiffle Ball into your yard. You would let the mower idle, bend over holding up your shorts, and pick up the ball and throw it back, a few fresh clippings attached.  Always I was impressed by the strength of your arm, and Randall would say his dad could throw twice as far. You said nothing because the mower was too loud, but you never seemed annoyed. Randall joked that you liked picking up our balls, which only then seemed hilarious.