Pay It Forward (5 page)

“Well, Trevor,” she said. “I think it’s a good project. Tell us some more about it.”

So Trevor explained, with the help of his calculator, how big this thing could become. Somewhere around the sixteenth level, at which he’d involved 43,046,721 people, the calculator proved smaller than Trevor’s optimism. But he was convinced that in just a few more levels the numbers would be larger than the population of the world. “Then you know what happens?”

Arlene looked to Reuben but he didn’t care to guess, wanting to hear it straight from Trevor’s obviously active brain.

“No, honey. What?”

“Then everybody gets helped more than once. And then it gets bigger even faster.”

“What do you think, Mr. St. Clair?” Arlene clearly wanted something from him, but he wasn’t sure from minute to minute what that something might be.

“I think it’s a noble idea, Trevor. A big effort. Big efforts lead to good grades. How do you feel about the fact that Jerry got arrested?”

Trevor sighed. From the look on Arlene’s face, Reuben had done his job correctly for a change.

“It’s okay, I guess. Except I just have to start all over, is all. It’s okay, though. I already got other ideas.”

“Like what, honey?” Arlene asked in that sugary voice she slipped into when questioning her own son.

“It’s a secret. Can I be excused?”

Arlene caught Reuben’s eye again, begging for something. As if she could not just say, No, young man, we are not done here. Reuben only shrugged.

“Okay, run along, then, honey.”

Trevor charged in the direction of his bedroom, but as he barreled by Reuben’s seat, Reuben took him gently by the sleeve and pulled him over close enough that Arlene, on the other side of the table, hopefully would not hear.

“You can’t orchestrate love, Trevor.”

“What’s ‘orchestrate’?”

“You can’t make it happen for somebody else.”

“Doesn’t that have something to do with music?”

“Not always.”

“Oh. You can’t, huh? I mean. Oh. Okay. That wasn’t my idea, though. Anyway.”

“Just checking.”

Reuben loosed his sleeve and he disappeared.

Reuben looked up to see Arlene glaring across the table with that mixture of stress and anger and rocket fuel to which he was becoming nicely accustomed.

“What’d you say to him?”

“It’s a secret. May I be excused?”

M
om and Mr. St. Clair like each other. I just know it. What I can’t figure out is, why don’t they know it? It’s right there, and I just feel like shaking them and saying, Oh, just admit it. Mr. St. Clair would be nice to her, I think. I think he’d give his entire heart to somebody who would say, You know, that’s a nice half a face you got there. You know, like the glass is half full instead of, well, you know. He’s sad about his face. I think if he wasn’t, he could admit it better when he liked somebody. But then my mom has a great face and she’s doing it too. Go figure.

What if the world really changed because of my project? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing? Then everybody would say, Who cares about his face, he’s the best teacher in the world, that’s what matters. That would be so cool.

I think the best shot I got now for my project is Mrs. Greenberg. Jerry got arrested and Mr. St. Clair says you can’t orchestrate love, which made it sound like I was trying to wave a baton around or something. But so far it looks like he’s right.

But a garden. A garden holds still for all that orchestra stuff.

H
er late husband, Martin, had believed in miracles, but the cancer took him just the same. Since he’d gone, she’d tried to bring that belief around again, thinking it to be natural to the family, divinely intended to live in her little blue-gray house.

And this evening, for the first time in years, it sat on the porch swing with her as she sipped her iced tea. It smiled for her and through her, and she smiled back.

A miracle in the shape of her garden.

Lately she’d begun to dream of waking up, stretching and flexing through the pain in her arthritic joints, easing to the window to discover that, as if by magic, the garden was once again whole. And now, in the dusk of a cool spring evening, the garden was whole. Trimmed, the grass mowed, beds laid with fresh cedar chips, freshly raked, bags of leaves and trimmings bundled at the curb, soon to be trash-day history.

Not an unexplained miracle, exactly, because she’d watched the neighbor boy do it all, day after day. Barely a head taller than he, she’d stood at his side and shown him the junctions at which rosebushes begged to be trimmed and the aphids to be sprayed,
and the weeds that had to come out, and the ground cover meant to be cut back, watered, encouraged to flourish.

But miracles can and do have middlemen, she decided, and then she noticed that her iced tea tasted sweeter than usual that night, though made to the same proportions, and that the cold glass did not ache her arthritis the way it usually did.

And as if to dampen this perfect balance just the moment she’d discovered it, her son, Richard Green, came up the walk for his bimonthly visit.

How a woman named Greenberg had a son named Green was beyond her, but it was his legal name, though she would never call him by it. He had turned his back on the name of his father, her late husband, as if in shame, and the thought of it swept through her scalp the way a migraine would, every time, dividing her brain for the exquisite ache to follow. He walked like James Dean, or half like him, with all of the ego and none of the grace, and every time he came to visit he looked more and more like Elvis, with his big, unruly sideburns. Even on a cool spring night he wore those sleeveless muscle tees—unflattering to his hairy shoulders—and sunglasses, despite the fading light.

He’d been a smart boy, Richard, a brilliant boy, but seemingly with no payoff, unlike the neighbor boy, who appeared quite simple, and average in intelligence, yet seemed to prove otherwise with his very willingness to be where he was needed.

At forty-two, Richard was not a willing man, nor was he serious, unless anxious counts, and not particularly cheerful or helpful. But maybe intelligence is not associated with cheerful willingness; too bad she could not trade in Richard’s intelligence at this late date. Seemed its only real purpose was to lose him every job he ever tried, being too good as he was for all of them. And she had no more money to lend him, and would not if she could.

He stood on her porch step, a cigarette tucked high in the crook of his first two fingers.

“Hi, Mom.”

“So? What do you think?”

“About what?”

“The garden.”

He spun on the heels of his two-tone leather boots and flipped his dark glasses up to the top of his thin hairline.

“Shit. You paid somebody. I told you I’d do it.”

“I didn’t pay.”

“You did it yourself? Come on. You can’t even make a fist.”

“The neighbor boy did it for free.”

“Very funny.”

“He did.”

“It must’ve taken hours.”

“He’s been working for days. You haven’t been around.”

“I told you I’d do it.”

“Yes. You told me. But you didn’t do it.”

“Shit.”

He walked inside and flipped on the TV to a
M*A*S*H
rerun, and though she called after him to extinguish his cigarette, he failed to hear her or pretended not to.

And then, when she followed him in and sprayed all around the clean living room area with pine-scent Glade, he complained bitterly about the smell and said it made him cough.

A
T FIRST HE’D JUST COME BY TO TALK,
and that was good enough, and Mrs. Greenberg had never expected more.

She was right near the end of his paper route, which he changed around just a little so her house would be the very last. He’d leave his big, heavy old bicycle on its side on her lawn and bring the paper right to her door and knock, knowing as he did that it was a bother for her to go out after it. She was so pleased
by his thoughtful attention that she always offered him a glass of cherry Kool-Aid, which she bought specially for him, and he’d sit at her kitchen table and talk to her. About school mostly, and football, and then a special project he had thought up for his social studies class, and how he needed more people he could help, and she said she had some gardening to be done, though she couldn’t afford to pay much.

He said she wasn’t to pay anything at all to him, and what she paid to others needn’t be money, unless that was what she had plenty of. And then he drew some circles for her on a piece of paper, with her name in one, and told her about Paying Forward.

“It’s like random acts of kindness,” she’d said, but he disagreed. It was not random, not at all, and therein lay its beauty, built right into the sweet organization of the deal.

It was a foggy Saturday morning when he came by, six o’clock sharp as promised, and they stood in the mist in the front yard, the blue-gray paint peeling from her worried little house, and the smell of damp in the air, and little drips from the oak trees overhead cool in her hair.

He touched the roses as if they were puppies with their eyes still closed, or rare old books edged in gold leaf, and she knew he’d love her garden and it would love him back. And that something was being returned to her which had been away too long and had kept too much of her away with it.

“How is the project going so far?” she said, because she could see it was important to him, a subject he liked to talk a lot about.

His brow furrowed and he said, “Not so good, Mrs. Greenberg. Not so good.” He said, “Do you think that maybe people won’t really pay it forward? That maybe they’ll just say they will, or even sort of mean to, but maybe something’ll go wrong, or maybe they’ll just never get around to it?”

She knew it was a genuine problem in his mind, one of those Santa Claus crossroads of childhood that shape or destroy a person’s faith forevermore, and this boy was too good to turn astray.

So she said, “I can only in truth speak for myself, Trevor, and say that I really will get around to it, and take it every bit as seriously as I know you do.”

She could still remember his smile.

He worked so hard that day, and wouldn’t even stop for a Kool-Aid break but once, and when he finished she tried to slip a five-dollar bill in his hand, above and beyond and in no way connected to paying it forward, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

He worked all weekend, and four after-school and after-paper-route days on the garden, and said next week he would come around and paint her fence and window boxes and porch railing with two fresh coats of white.

She wondered if her son, Richard, would notice the difference.

S
HE WALKED TO THE GROCERY STORE SLOWLY,
loosening her tight joints and muscles as they warmed to the strain. Just to get out of the house. Imagine the sadness in that, when your son comes to visit and you mostly wish to be somewhere else.

It was late dusk on the Camino, with the car headlights glowing spooky in the half-light as she pulled her little two-wheeled wire cart behind her over the sidewalk cracks. Mrs. Greenberg always took the same route to the same store, being comforted by sameness.

Terri was working as a checker that evening and Matt as a bagger, two of her favorite people in the world. No more than twenty, either one of them, but quick with a smile for an older woman, no condescension, always thinking to ask about her day, her arthritis, and still listening when she gave the answer.

She bought twelve cans of cat food and a five-pound bag of dry cat chow, for the strays who counted on her, and cherry
Kool-Aid for the boy, and Richard’s favorite brand of beer, and tea and skinless chicken breasts and bran cereal for herself.

All the while thinking, Terri and Matt, that’s two who probably could be counted on to pass it along, and maybe that nice lady at the North County Cat Shelter would make a fitting third. Richard would have a cow, but maybe tough love was just what he needed, and with that thought fresh in her mind, she returned to the cooler and put his beer back on the shelf. He could drink Kool-Aid or iced tea, or go home and take his smoke and his money problems with him.

“Good evening, Mrs. Greenberg,” Terri said, running the groceries across the scanner. “I drove by your house today. The garden looks wonderful.”

It pleased her in an uplifting way, like a dance with a good-looking boy in high school, that someone besides herself should notice and care.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “Trevor McKinney did all that. Such a good boy. Do you know him?”

Terri didn’t imagine that she did, but it obviously pleased her to see Mrs. Greenberg so beaming, and Matt too, who mirrored back her own smile as he bagged her cat food.

He had one of those modern hairstyles, Matt, a handsome boy with hair shaved high up onto his scalp, and longer on top, but always clean, with a fresh look to say, I’m modern, not a punk.

“Nice to see you so happy tonight, Mrs. Greenberg.” He loaded her little cart carefully so it would balance just right.

It would be nice to see Matt happy, too, though by design she would not be around to see it. Young people needed a little nest egg, for college maybe, though it would not be enough for tuition, maybe books and clothes, or whatever they might choose to spend it for, because she felt they could both be trusted.

And that nice lady at the cat shelter, she would put it right back into spaying and neutering and other vet costs. No doubting her priorities.

Yes, she thought, back out in the crisp, clean-smelling night. It’s right. She’d make the calls first thing in the morning.

H
ER CHEST FIRST BEGAN TO HURT
on the way home. Not her heart, but more her lungs, like a bad congestion, and she stopped often to catch her breath. She was not such an old woman, she had to remind herself, just over retirement age, but since losing Martin her body seemed to turn in on itself, as though it couldn’t wait. As though her immunities no longer cared to protect her but meant to hasten her along. The arthritis had tripled its hold since then, and she’d catch any little thing that was going around.

Stopping often to rest, she took a detour, which she never did, by Trevor McKinney’s house. Such a nice little house, with a curvy shingle roof, heavy with vegetation but never overgrown looking. Too bad about that twisted, awful thing in her driveway looking like the spooky remains of an ugly death on the highway. Mrs. Greenberg imagined his mother must want it gone, want the simple beauty of her place back, maybe even dreamed of it the way she herself had dreamed for her garden.

They had company tonight, she saw, stopping for breath at the walkway. A white Volkswagen Beetle, nicely cared for, parked out front. A new boyfriend. Good. She’d seen the old one, didn’t think much of the type.

And she could see, through the window, into the brightly lit dining room, the right side of his face in profile. A well-dressed black man, so handsome and refined.

Well, good, then. Good for them.

Mrs. Greenberg hoped Trevor’s mother wouldn’t listen to anybody, wouldn’t let any small minds get in her way. They had tried to tell her not to marry Martin, because he was a Jewish boy, but she wouldn’t listen, and he’d been the best husband a woman could ask for. A good man is a good man.

Maybe Trevor’s mother would get married. Nice for the boy if she did. She’d never met Trevor’s mother but knew she would like her, because look what she had produced with her own womb and her loving care. A boy who could love a garden for a sick, arthritic woman who couldn’t love it enough.

“You have a good woman there,” she said quietly, out loud, to the handsome, refined man in the window, who of course did not hear. “A good woman with a good boy. You take care of them. I know you will.”

When she arrived home at last, winded and sore chested, Richard was blissfully gone.

She took a hot bath and laid herself, coughing, to bed, knowing that whatever happened now, the garden was tended. The porch would take a coat of paint. Tomorrow she’d make some calls, some arrangements. After that it didn’t matter.

Even if the thing that latched onto her next was a bad one—pneumonia, or the Asian flu. Even if she couldn’t pull through this time, it wouldn’t matter. Everything was tended, or would be by then.

Sleep felt heavy and all consuming, like the comforting mouth of death as she imagined it, holding as it did her Martin and a long, much-deserved rest.