Abby drove around trying to remember the directions to the house. The eviction notice had showed up on her door and she had until the end of the month to find a place to live. The manager wanted her out regardless of whether or not she managed to come up with the rent money. He claimed that he had a waiting list of people who would pay the rent on time. The few single friends that she had couldn't offer much help beyond a couch in their living room. She was desperate and didn't know what else to try.
She wasn't having much luck finding the house, but did spot him mowing a lawn. She pulled her little Nova over to the curb and honked the horn. When he looked over in her direction, she waved and got out of the car. He pushed the lawn mower to the edge of the lawn and then killed the engine. Once it was quiet enough to be heard, she said, "Hello."
"Hello," Jack replied trying to remember her name. To tell the truth, he was more than a little surprised to see her there.
Knowing that this wasn't his house, she asked, "What are you doing?"
"I'm mowing a couple of lawns to get some cash. There are a lot of widows in this neighborhood and I can usually talk them into paying me twenty bucks to mow their lawn," Jack answered. He would get six or seven houses on a weekend. It would be enough money for gasoline, some food, and maybe to pay a bill or two. It wouldn't pay for the electricity bill which was up around three hundred dollars.
"Ah," Abby said thinking that men had it a lot easier than women sometimes. At least he wasn't lazy. It didn't dawn on her that she could probably do the same thing if she owned a lawnmower.
"I've got this one to finish and one more up the street to do before I'm done for the day," Jack said. He shifted his shoulders trying to ease some of the tension out of them.
"Do you mind if I wait around for you to finish?" Abby asked licking her lips nervously.
"That's fine with me, but it'll take an hour or more for me to finish. You might be more comfortable waiting for me at the house," Jack said.
Embarrassed, she said, "I don't remember where your house is."
"It is on the next street over. My truck is parked in the driveway," Jack said gesturing in the direction of his house. He wished that he could remember her name.
"Okay, I'll see you over there," Abby said.
Jack watched her return to her car and drive off. He stood there for a minute saying, "Annie? No, that's not it. Gabby? That's not it. I wish I could remember her name."
Abby found the house without much difficulty. Parking her car behind the truck, she got out and looked around the neighborhood. It was very quiet there compared to her apartment complex. She sat on the porch. Not for the first time she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She didn't even know Jack. For all she knew, he could be a serial killer or a rapist.
The elderly woman from next door walked over and said, "He's not home."
"I know. He's mowing a lawn on the next street over," Abby replied finding it a little amusing that the neighbors kept track of what he was doing.
"I saw you over here the other night. Are you his girlfriend?" the elderly woman asked climbing the few steps to reach the porch.
Abby was pretty sure that in twenty minutes this old woman would know everything there was to know about her. She said, "No. I understood that he might have a room to rent."
"Oh," the woman said with a frown. She didn't know what she thought about a woman renting a room from a single man. She said, "He's a nice enough young man. He has had it kind of tough since the economy took a downturn."
"Everyone has had it tough. It seems to me like the prices have gone up and the wages have gone down," Abby said.
The elderly woman nodded her head and said, "My investments have lost half of their value over the past year. I don't know if I'm going to be able to survive on what I have left. Social security doesn't cover the bills. My electricity bill ate up half of my social security check last month."
"Tell me about it," Abby said.
The elderly woman said, "They keep talking about electric cars. That just doesn't make sense to me. Electricity is more expensive than gasoline."
"The way that gasoline is going up, that might not be true for much longer," Abby said. She had put fifty dollars worth of gasoline in her little car that morning. Gasoline prices had dropped right after the election, but climbed right back up with the coming of summer.
The elderly woman took a seat in one of chairs on the porch and said, "I remember when gasoline was fifteen cents a gallon. For two dollars we could drive our car around all week. Of course, at that time a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today."
"Fifteen cents a gallon. I can't even imagine that," Abby said wondering what it had been like in those days.
"I'm Claire."
"I'm Abby."
Settling into her chair as if she was there to stay for awhile, Claire said, "Things were a lot different in those days. My grandmother used to live with my parents when I was growing up. She didn't have to worry about the stock market and greedy bastards stealing her retirement money. My mom and dad made sure that she had food to eat, a roof over her head, and they paid her medical bills."
"People looked out for each other in those days," Abby said.
Feeling alone and helpless before the onslaught of events that she was powerless to control, Claire said, "This garbage happening up on Wall Street is killing me. I'm afraid that one day I'll be homeless. I think I'd kill myself before I would let myself be homeless at my age. One cold night out on the streets and I'd be dead anyway."
"I heard about some jerk that headed a large company getting a fifty million dollar bonus even though the company went bankrupt. It just isn't right," Abby said.
"In my grandfather's day, they would have called a man like that a thief and hung him from the nearest tree," Claire said.
"We're too civilized for that now," Abby said shaking her head.
Claire said, "What is happening today isn't civilized; it is immoral. Taking that money is just plain criminal."
"You're right," Abby said.
Claire asked, "What do you do for a living?"
"I work in a nursing home," Abby answered thinking that mentioning her career as a massage therapist wouldn't go over too well with the elderly woman.
"Those are depressing places. I hope to God I don't end up in one of those," Claire said pleased to hear that the young woman was in a respectable profession.
"Same here," Abby said. After working there for a few weeks, she really never wanted to end up in nursing home. The smell of the place nearly killed her every morning when she showed up to work.
Claire asked, "Do you like your job?"
"Not really. Like you said, it is a depressing place. There's nothing glamorous about my job. About the only positive thing I can say about it is that I take care of people who can't take care of themselves," Abby said. The nursing home was a warehouse filled with people who were waiting to die. It would be even more depressing if they weren't drugged to the gills.
"I guess I can understand that," Claire said.
Abby said, "I'm curious about Jack. What can you tell me about him?"
Claire cocked her head and studied Abby for a few seconds. Finally, she said, "There was a time when a gentleman would mow the lawn of a widow for the simple reason that it was the polite thing for a neighbor to do. Of course, the widow woman would offer a dollar or two as a token of her appreciation."
"Okay," Abby said not quite following how that answered her question.
"It is not that way now. Nobody does anything for anybody without asking for money. Jack charges twenty dollars to mow a lawn and he only mows the lawns of the widows in the area. Now that seems a little high, but it is nothing compared to what a service would charge. Most of the services in this area charge five times that much," Claire said. She didn't want to mention that the town now wrote tickets out to homeowners who let their yards get out of control. It was just another way the town was raising money to cover expenses. Paying Jack twenty dollars to mow the lawn was a lot cheaper than the hundred dollar fine they would get.
"Oh," Abby said. She hadn't thought about how much Jack was charging. Now that Claire had brought it up, she realized that he was giving them quite a break.
"He's not an old fashioned gentleman, but he is about the closest to being one of any young man that I know about," Claire said. She wasn't really saying anything particularly bad about Jack; she was commenting on the nature of modern times.
Abby studied Claire for a minute and asked, "What else does he do?"
Claire smiled and said, "He does go around the neighborhood when the weather's bad to make sure that everyone is alright. There was one time when we had a pretty good snow and I was out of bread. He brought a quarter of a loaf of bread over before shoveling my drive."
"So you're telling me that he's a nice guy," Abby said.
"You never know with people. If you want to know if he'll show up in your room one night demanding that you have sex with him, I can't say. Folks are different in private then when they are in public. What I can say is that he is well mannered for these times and that he is polite in public," Claire said.
Abby felt that there was something that Claire wasn't telling her, but she didn't know if it was something nice or not. She said, "That's true. You never know about people."
Claire looked around the porch and said, "He was really fixing up this place when he had a steadier job. You could tell that he took a great deal of pride in the house. He still does, but money is tight for him at the moment. They turned off his electricity a month ago because he couldn't pay it."
"He told me about that. You sound like you don't approve," Abby said.
"A man is supposed to be able to pay his bills," Claire said a little more sharply than she had intended. The values of fifty years ago didn't seem to apply to the world of today. Back then a man who worked was assured of keeping his job. That wasn't true today.
"That's a whole lot easier said than done today," Abby said.
Claire looked a little embarrassed and said, "This year was the first time in my life that I ever had difficulty paying my bills. The property taxes on my house doubled, the electricity went through the roof, and then all of my investments went down the tubes. I tell you, I was absolutely mortified when I started getting past due notices in the mail on half of my bills. I might not exactly approve of a man having financial difficulties like that, but I understand a whole lot better now how that can happen."
Abby said, "My rent went up three hundred dollars a month, the electricity nearly doubled, and the cost of getting to and from work went up by thirty percent. I was just barely getting by before that happened, but now..."
"Life is hard for a woman living alone," Claire said realizing that Abby had just explained why she would consider moving in with Jack. Women had done worse things to survive bad times.
Abby said, "I think that life is hard period."
"Do your parents help you out?" Claire asked.
Shaking her head, Abby said, "They are divorced. Mom is living with some guy and my Dad is off in another part of the country raising a second family. I'm pretty much on my own."
"That's a shame," Claire said shaking her head. She studied the younger woman for a minute and then asked, "What will your boyfriend think of you moving in with some guy?"
"I don't have a boyfriend," Abby said thinking that Claire was doing a marvelous job of unearthing everything there was to know about her. Knowing what was going to get asked next, she smiled and added, "I've never been married."
"What was your last boyfriend like?"
Abby said, "He was a decent guy, but we just didn't click. I don't know why not, but there were times we'd look at each other wondering why we were together. When I couldn't afford to go to the same places he wanted to go to, things just kind of dropped off to nothing."
"That's a shame," Claire said. She thought about what Abby had said and then asked, "He expected you to pay your own way?"
"Sometimes. Some things are just too expensive for one person to pay for today. Tickets to a football game run a hundred dollars a person," Abby said shrugging her shoulders.
Claire shook her head and said, "Things sure are different from when I was a young girl. If a man ever expected me to pay my way, he was history. We just did less expensive things when we got together if he didn't have money."
"I guess times are different," Abby said. She wondered if she hadn't been a sap her whole life.
"I blame woman's lib. It didn't accomplish much except make it more difficult for men and women to get along. Before, there were rules that mattered. A man had certain duties and obligations to a woman. A man was expected to provide for a family so he needed to earn more than a single woman. A woman had certain behaviors that were expected of her. Once she got married, her duty was to the house and family," Claire said.
"What if you didn't want to live like that?" Abby said.
Claire said, "It wasn't a matter of wanting to live like that. There wasn't a choice. There wasn't a choice for the man or the woman. It was just how life was. Now there are no rules. A woman can't depend on a man and a man can't depend on a woman. Women's liberation only made life tougher for everyone."
"You can't mean that," Abby exclaimed.
"I was in my twenties during the 60's. I grew up with one set of values and watched them all change over a ten year period. Not everyone back then was a hippy trying to change the world. Some of us were trying to keep things how they were," Claire said.
"Why on earth would you have fought against women's liberation?"
Claire said, "Life before it was a whole lot more secure for a woman. I knew when I got married that I'd be quitting my job and creating a home. My husband would go to work every day and bring home a paycheck. I'd have kids and raise them. Being a wife and mother would be my job. It was a perfectly dignified thing to do. The fact of the matter is that I enjoyed my life living like an old fashioned woman."
"Oh," Abby said shaking her head. She couldn't imagine growing up looking forward to that kind of restricted life.
"Times are different today. People don't respect women who stay at home and raise their children. From what I can tell, women lost out on the deal," Claire said with a shrug of her shoulders.
"I don't know what to say," Abby said flabbergasted. Growing up after the women's right movement, the mindset that Claire represented was always attributed to men and never women. She was finding it hard to believe that there women who thought that was the right way to live.
Claire looked down the street and said, "When I was young, a man was basically a failure if he couldn't support his family. A man would save up his money and buy a house that he could afford. He'd live within his means because there wasn't that much credit at the time. If you ran out of money at the end of the month then you just didn't eat. You saved money for a rainy day and there were always rainy days. A man would die of shame if his wife had to work. Only poor families had wives that worked.
"The wife's job was to help make the money go further. You shopped for good bargains. You made your own clothes rather than pay for off the shelf items. You canned your own foods and baked your own desserts. You never went out for dinner except for special occasions. It was a whole lot different in those days."
"You can say that again," Abby said. She didn't know how to sew clothes or can foods.
Claire said, "Today, I see families in which the husband and wife both have to work in order to make ends meet. My daughter is that way. Their kids were raised by strangers. She had them in day care, school, and after school programs. They were almost complete strangers. Of course, my daughter had no control over them. She was just the evening and weekend shift. No one has any money saved. More often than not it is because they want more than they need."
"Yeah," Abby said.
Claire said, "I can't blame the men or the women for the problems. Things are expensive today and nothing lasts. I had an iron that lasted for thirty-five years. When it finally broke, I bought a new one. It broke within four years."
"Nothing lasts today," Abby said.
Claire realized that maybe she hadn't been entirely accurate in her characterization of the past. She said, "Growing up, my parents were surrounded by a big family that all helped each other. There were grandparents, parents, cousins, brothers, and sisters all within yelling distance. That was a real support network. If something bad happened, you could get a hundred people together within a day to help out.
"For my husband and me, we were the nuclear family. All our brothers and sisters moved away and they just weren't there for us. There were just the two of us and the kids. I was a stay at home mom. When we needed something fixed, we had to hire someone to do it. My parents never paid for a babysitter. We did, but it was just for the very rare evening.
"My daughter had a different kind of family. I think they call it a latch key family. Mom and Dad worked while the kids were basically raised by strangers. I guess it was functional for the time. At least it wasn't too much less functional than every other family out there."
"I was a latch key kid until my parents divorced. I guess you could say that I'm a broken home kid," Abby said.
"That's too common today," Claire said. She was glad that she had grown up when she did. She didn't think she would like being a young woman in the modern world.
Abby said, "Most of my friends grew up in single parent families."
Claire was silent for a minute thinking about how each generation had become more and more isolated. She said, "It makes you wonder what is going to happen with the next batch of kids."
"People aren't having kids," Abby said. Not one of her friends had a child yet and most weren't planning on having one any time soon.
Claire said, "That's a shame."
Shrugging her shoulders, Abby said, "A different strategy is needed to get by in the modern world. I don't know what it is. To tell the truth, I don't think anyone has found a strategy that works. I think we need to try something different."
Interested, Claire asked, "What are you thinking about?"
Unsure how the elderly woman would react, Abby said, "You're going to think that I'm trying to recreate a sixties movement."
"What?" Claire asked.
Abby said, "Communes."
"I never thought much of communes. All of that free love hogwash and live off the land crud just didn't make sense to me," Claire said dismissively.
"I wasn't thinking of that kind of commune," Abby said, "I was thinking along more economic lines."
"Economic?" Claire asked with a raised eyebrow.
Well, not just economic," Abby said faltering. She frowned trying to put her idea into words, but wasn't very successful. She said, "I haven't worked it out yet, but it seems to me that any size group can live cheaper when together than when they apart."
"That's true to a degree, but there is more to it than money when you have to share things," Claire said. People tended to be greedy and lazy when there were others to do the work for them. She felt that was very much a constant of human nature regardless of the times.
"Desperation can be a powerful inducement to cooperate. Sometimes you have no choice except to trust someone," Abby said.
Claire said, "Isn't that the truth."
Jack strode up the driveway pushing the lawnmower in front of him. A gas can was hanging from the handle by a clothes hanger. The weak wire had been bent into loop with the hanger portion twisted around part of the loop to hold it together. He waved to the two women on the porch with one hand while taking the mower to the garage.
When he had disappeared from view, Claire said, "One thing that I can say about him is that he is a hard worker."
"That's good," Abby said. She could hear the sounds of him washing the lawnmower. She said, "He takes care of what he has."
"He tries," Claire said shaking her head.
"What's the matter?" Abby asked upon hearing the tepid response.
Claire said, "He's maintaining, but not building something. That's a losing battle."
"Oh," Abby said thinking that one little insight explained a lot of her life and the lives of her friends. They were all just trying to maintain what they had and they were all losing it.
Jack came around the corner and said, "Hello, ladies."
"Hi, Jack. I was just over here keeping Abby company," Claire said.
A wave of relief washed over Jack upon hearing his visitor's name. He smiled and said, "I'm sorry I took so long. Mrs. Johns asked me to fix her back porch for her."
"Why does she want to fix it?" Claire asked. She didn't think that Mrs. Johns had enough money to spend fixing up things unless it was in absolutely necessary.
Jack made an offhand gesture and said, "She can't afford the property taxes anymore. She's hoping that she can sell the house and move into a retirement home, but the porch is pretty run down. The screens have holes in them, the wood flooring is rotten in places, and the door doesn't close all of the way."
"That sounds like a lot of work. How much are you going to charge her?" Claire asked.
Jack frowned and looked down at the ground. He answered, "I told her I'd charge for materials and five dollars an hour. She wasn't too happy when she heard how much the materials would probably cost."
"That's a shame. You might consider charging a little more for your time," Claire said. She gave Abby a significant look.
Jack said, "I can't do that. She's a widow living on a fixed income. You don't do that to a widow."
"That's not a very business-like position to take. You've got bills to pay," Claire said.
They had talked about that matter in the past. He said, "I can't pay bills with money that leaves a little old lady having to choose between food and medicine."
"I'm sorry to hear that she's moving," Claire said. They had been in that neighborhood ever since their children had gone to school together. That was forty years of time spent knowing someone. They might not be the best of friends, but there had been memories built up over the years. She was going to miss her.
"She's kind of depressed about the decision to move and how much it is costing to fix up her house for sale. She could probably use some company," Jack said.
"I'll go over and talk to her," Claire said. She wondered if he would have come over to the house to tell her if she hadn't been visiting.
"She would appreciate it," Jack said knowing that he would be spending a lot of time fixing the patio that could have been used to earn more money.
"There's nothing like giving up a house to make you sad. She probably shouldn't be alone," Claire said.
"Well, I did happen to mention something to Flo. She headed over there a few minutes ago," Jack said. Flo's house was up for sale so he felt that she probably understood what Mrs. Johns was feeling better than Claire.
Claire climbed out of the chair and said, "It has been nice talking to you, Abby. Just don't move too fast on your idea. I think that you need to think about it some more."
"Yes, ma'am. You are probably right," Abby said with a tired frown. She didn't have the luxury of time to think about it more.
Once Claire had left the porch, Jack sat down on the recently vacated chair. He stretched and said, "Seven hours of pushing that lawnmower. I almost ran over a little bunny, but it ran out of the way. I didn't see it until it was almost too late. I'm glad it saw me. I made a hundred and twenty dollars."
"What will you do with all that money?" Abbey asked.
"I'll buy a water pump with what I made yesterday and today. I'll get the truck working and pick up the supplies with Mrs. Johns. I should have enough left for a couple of meals until I get done with the real work," Jack answered.
"You're losing money doing that job," Abbey said.
Shaking his head, Jack knew that he wasn't losing money. If there had been another job for him to do he would have done it. While fixing the porch he would be earning something rather than just sitting around not making money. He said, "I'm not going to ruin someone's life just because I can."
Abby nodded her head in agreement. She said, "I can understand that."
"So many people are just barely getting by. I'm young and I'll recover. Someone who is seventy or eighty just doesn't have time to recover," Jack said. He rubbed his shoulders trying to ease some of the tension out of them.
"Tense?" Abby asked noticing that he was rubbing his shoulders quite frequently.
"Yes, I am," Jack said.
Deciding that Jack was a pretty decent fellow, Abby decided to take a chance on telling him her idea. Hoping she wasn't making a mistake, she said, "I'll give you a massage if you'll listen to what I have to say."