From the kitchen window she watched him walk the vineyard middle to his place,
a small house built in a clearing for the irrigation pump, then checked the ledger
in the office. In the column below Cadell’s address, her father had written paid in
every previous row. The gap started with July, Neda’s month.
*
Lonnie Cadell came back later that morning and every morning for weeks. His
shoulders quaked under his t-shirt, pushing the mower or edging the curbs. He
seemed as much drill sergeant as gardener, claiming authority over the ground
he tended, or rather, commanded. But he did not move quickly. Pain showed in
his face when he had to bend over. Once, after clearing the grass from a sprinkler
head with hand clippers and a trowel, he had to crawl across the breezeway to
a chair. She took him a glass of ice water, and hoped the job would be finished
soon, that they could come to a new arrangement before this one killed him.
*
92
It was during that same stretch that most renters made good on their
arrangements. Neda tallied the amounts on the ledger and inked the word paid
in the row. She tried to get hold of her one remaining delinquent by phone, but
when no one picked up on the other end, she saw no option but to visit the house
in person.
In her father’s old pickup she pumped the gas twice, jammed the column shifter
in to and out of parking gear, and shook the key in the worn ignition barrel. The
engine caught, cried. Lighted symbols in the dashboard went off one by one. The
passenger floorboard was deep with faded pink receipts from t he hardware store
and lumberyard, snowed over with fine valley dust, dry and bitter in the nose, on
the teeth.
She found it hard to keep the wheels tracking straight on the crowned pavement.
At the stop sign she looked at the house across the street, where the family of an
old friend lived, the white siding visible through a window of eucalyptus trees.
She turned toward the Sikh temple and the elementary school, though she could
have gone right and got to where she was going just as easily. Of the twenty-