weather held, they would explode into full bloom by
the middle of the week.
It was a jeans and muddy workshoes weekend. Dwight
and the children and I spent most of it out in the yard,
and some of my brothers and a couple of sisters-in-law
stopped by to help set out a row of crepe myrtles on
either side of the long drive out to the hardtop. Their
twigs were bare now but Dwight promised that by late
July we would be driving in and out through clouds of
watermelon red.
It wasn’t all work. The year before, my nephews and
nieces had installed a regulation height basketball hoop
at the peak of the garage roof so that they could use the
concrete apron in front for a half-court. Dwight low-
ered the hoop from ten feet to eight, inflated four of
the collapsed balls stashed in a bushel basket beneath
the work bench, and showed the kids the hook shot that
could have let him play for Carolina had he not joined
the army instead.
Cal and a chastened Mary Pat were on their best be-
havior with Jake. Being outdoors in the milder weather
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helped, of course. Running, jumping, digging in the
dirt, riding their bikes, or using the hose to water in
the new plants doesn’t take fine motor skills and there’s
no squabbling over balls when every kid has one. It
also helped that Robert had brought his grandson Bert
along and that Bert was the same age as Jake. It took a
lot of pressure off the two older children.
Some of the farm dogs showed up and there was a
flurry of snarls and growls and bared teeth before they
backed down and acknowledged that Bandit did indeed
own the territory around the house, territory he’d spent
the last few weeks assiduously marking.
Will and his wife Amy came out from town and Will
got sucked into work while I stomped the dirt off my
shoes and went inside with Amy. Will’s three brothers
up from me; Amy is his third wife. She’s also the head of
Human Resources at Dobbs Memorial Hospital and she
was in the process of writing a grant proposal to fund
a pilot program for servicing their Hispanic patients. I
had told her that I would vet the proposal and that we
could use my Lexis Nexis account to look up pertinent
case law as it pertains to undocumented aliens.
“Documented or not, we’re getting so many people
in our emergency room and at the well-baby clinic that
we need more translators to work every shift,” she said.
“It scares the bejeebers out of some of the doctors and
