The Cadence of Grass Read Online Free

pulled into Stuart and Natalie’s driveway, parking directly behind Stuart’s well-kept Fairlane and Natalie’s Mustang with its MSTNG SLLY vanity plates, a car Paul thought too young for her. Stuart came around the house operating a leaf blower and wearing ear protection. When Stuart saw him, he turned off his blower with an amiable smile, propped it against the house with his ear protectors slung over its handle, swept the grass clippings from his trousers and came toward Paul with a pigeon-toed lurch. Paul watched his approach with raised eyebrows. He actually liked Stuart’s personality for its lack of surprises, for the rolled-up sleeves of his shirts and for the shoes that had been nursed through several changes of style by careful care. The ones he wore today resembled the ones you saw in portraits of the Pilgrims. He knew as well that Stuart was sometimes rather hard done by in his relations with Natalie. He’d once arrived unexpectedly and found Natalie, arms stiff at her sides, shouting at Stuart, “
Please
don’t say ‘davenport’! Just this once for me, say ‘
sofa
’!” Sometimes, Paul had got the disquieting feeling that Stuart was watching him. If Paul was to take over the life of the family, he wasn’t going to be keen on having this feeling.
    “Paul, hey, what’s up?”
    “Not much. Just grabbed an ice cream. Been watching Little League.”
    Stuart glanced at his watch. “They’re nearly done. Ace Hardware wins today and they clinch a playoff slot.”
    “Where’s Nat?”
    “She’s at her mother’s. The cruise is only a couple of days away.”
    “Yeah, I bought Mother Whitelaw a little going-away present.”
    Stuart seemed to flinch. “I wonder if I should’ve gotten something. I didn’t even think about it.”
    “Trade beads.”
    “Oh, Paul.”
    Paul caught a whiff of Stuart’s appraisal in his self-discounting body language. In prison you look for every trace of these things so some babyface doesn’t push a sharpened utensil through your liver. It was one thing to be observant and quite another to be absolutely awake. That’s where Paul had gotten by dint of long effort, and that’s where he intended to stay. Certain conflicts lay inevitably ahead. Just now it was time to lay some assurance and bon voyage on the old lady, the holdout being a certain warm feeling that might beguile the rest of them.
    “I’m just glad Alice is getting away, Stu. She’ll learn some real changes.”
    “I wish I were so sure,” Stuart said.
    “You can’t believe how adaptable women are. They’re like chameleons. Match the color of any background, including plaid.”
    “You can’t say that about Natalie.”
    “Nat’s the exception that proves the rule. The others just wear themselves out trying.”
    Stuart turned to resume his work, ending the conversation. Paul wasn’t sure there wasn’t a message here. He frowned slightly and called, “Catch you later,” thinking that if Stuart were any measure, Paul’s vow upon release from prison—of not settling for being less than larger than life—was coming true. He drove across town to his mother-in-law’s house, which Sunny Jim, in an access of imperial ego, had named “Whitelaw.” After consideration, he declined to knock upon the brass and varnish surface of the door, smelling the heat on the russet brick and thinking, Alaska, that’s a good one, and simply strolled in, in order to see Mrs. Whitelaw off, the former Alice Nyoka Smoot, and give her something to trade with the Eskimos. But no, it turned out a little traveler’s portfolio was more like it. Thinking about what she might appreciate and training his mind away from chilblain cures, folklore of the Gold Rush, et cetera, he felt an odd affection for the old bag who’d had a hard time of it in her brutish marriage. It was rumored that, at fifteen, she had been flung from her white-trash household to fend for herself. When she received her gift, he recited, “There are