Lauders’ lawn was somehow English in its greenness and peace, but now a dervish in a blue bathing suit had invaded this pastoral scene. She could hear Harold panting in a way that was alarming to listen to as he turned the northeast corner where the Lauders’ back lawn was divided from the Wilsons’ by a row of mulberry bushes. He roared down the slope of the lawn, bent over the mower’s T-handle. The blades whirred. Grass flew in a green jet, coating Harold’s lower legs. He had mowed perhaps half of the lawn; what was left was a diminishing square with the summerhouse in the middle. He turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and then roared back, for a moment obscured from view by the summerhouse, and then reappearing, bent over his machine like a Formula One race driver. About halfway up, he saw her. At exactly the same instant Frannie said timidly: “Harold?” And she saw that he was in tears.
“Huh!” Harold said—squeaked, actually. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack.
Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air.
She took a step after him. “Harold, what’s wrong?”
Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie’s kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air.
Frannie stood indecisive for a while and at last walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but she could hear Harold crying somewhere inside.
“Harold?”
No answer. The weeping went on.
She let herself into the Lauders’ back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant—Mrs. Lauder’s cold-pantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Frannie could remember there had been the good smell of dried apples and cinnamon back here, like pies dreaming of creation.
“Harold?”
She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless.
“Harold, what’s wrong?”
“Go away!” he yelled tearfully. “Go away, you don’t like me!”
“Yes I do. You’re okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay.” She paused. “In fact, considering the circumstances and all, I’d have to say that right now you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world.”
This seemed to make Harold cry harder.
“Do you have anything to drink?”
“Kool-Aid,” he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: “It’s warm.”
“Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?” Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn’t that quaint.
“Yeah, that’s where I got it.”
She poured them each a glass and sat down.
Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. “Wrong? Now what could be wrong?”
“I mean, is it something specific?” She tasted her Kool-Aid and fought down a grimace. It wasn’t that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar.
He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. “I want my mother,” he said simply.
“Oh, Harold—”
“I thought when it happened, when she died, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’” He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. “I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew
“Harold, don’t. I know how you feel.”
He stared at her, dumbstruck. “You know… ?” He shook his head. “No. You couldn’t.”
“Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn’t even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You’ll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You’re already getting one,” she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.
He wiped his hands across his mouth. “I never even liked them that well,” he said, “but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder’s full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken.”
She nodded, thinking that was strange but not inapt.
“My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy’s friend,” he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. “And I horrified my father.”
Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.
“He took me aside once,” Harold resumed, “and asked me if I was a queerboy. That’s just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I’d best ride right out of town. And Amy… I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn’t give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room.”
With an effort, Fran finished her Kool-Aid.
“So when they were gone and I didn’t feel too much one way or the other, I just thought I was wrong. ‘Grief is not a knee-jerk reaction,’ I said to myself. But I got fooled. I missed them more and more every day. Mostly my mother. If I could just see her… a lot of times she wasn’t around when I wanted her… needed her… she was too busy doing things for Amy, or with Amy, but she was never mean to me. So this morning when I got thinking about it, I said to myself, ‘I’ll mow the grass. Then I won’t think about it.’ But I did. And I started to mow faster and faster… as if I could outrun it… and I guess that’s when you came in. Did I look as crazy as I felt, Fran?”
She reached across the table and touched his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you feel, Harold.”
“Are you sure?” He was looking at her again in that wide-eyed, childish stare.
“Yes.”
“Will you be my friend?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God,” Harold said. “Thank God for that.” His hand was sweaty in hers, and as she thought it, he seemed to sense it, and pulled his hand reluctantly away. “Would you like some more Kool-Aid?” he asked her humbly.
She smiled her best diplomatic smile. “Maybe later,” she said.
They had a picnic lunch in the park: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess Twinkies, and a large bottle of Coke each. The Cokes were fine after they had been cooled in the duck pond.
