Jeremiah Andrick

My father died in Japan in February and I could not get back. I told exactly one American, and only because he asked a direct question at a bad moment and I have never been able to lie fast enough. He did not say he was sorry. He said, "You busy Saturday?" I was not busy Saturday. I have not been busy on a Saturday since I arrived in this country. He wanted help moving a riding mower to the other side of his garage. The mower runs. He drove it out himself. I want to be accurate here, because I have thought about it a great deal since: the mower ended that day about two feet from where it started. We were in the garage five hours. There was a small refrigerator out there with beer in it and one orange drink belonging to his grandson, and neither of us touched the orange drink at any point. We discussed a shelf. We discussed a bolt for some time. Around one o'clock we spent close to forty minutes on the correct way to coil a hose, and he was wrong, and I told him he was wrong, and he told me to prove it, and I proved it, and he said "huh," and that was the end of it. He did not mention my father once. I had prepared for it. In my country a man in mourning is approached with fixed phrases that have been in service four hundred years, which is the entire purpose of them, and I had built mine in English over three nights. They were not good. They were ready. I never used them. I still have them written down. At six he said, "Same time next week?" We did that for five Saturdays. We moved a workbench. We rewired a light that already worked. One Saturday we sorted screws by length, which is not a job. That is somewhere to put a man. In April a neighbor three doors down lost his mother. I do not own a mower. I own a boat trailer that does not need to be moved. He came at eight. He is coming again this Saturday. I have not said one word to him about his mother and I am not going to. He knows what time.