and searches retirement homes within fifty miles of our zip code. She clicks on “request brochure” and types in Mr. Kalman’s name and address.
By Friday he’s getting a flood of mail from places like the Golden Villa, Sunset Hall, and Garden of Palms. He’s carrying so many brochures from his mailbox to his front door that I’m afraid he’ll fall. Then Sadie will be responsible for a broken hip, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean to take things that far.
Meanwhile I try the opposite approach. Guilt. Since I’m not allowed back in school until Monday, I go over and tidy up his front walk. I figure when he sees me raking leaves and clipping wild branches in his yard, he’ll feel he has to do something for me. Like be my lawyer.
And after three hours of hard physical labor, which I make seem like four by exaggerating my grunts and sighs near his window—“Oh, man, that’s a heavy bag of leaves!” Or, “Phew! Sure is hot out here, even in all this shade!”—the door opens, and I think Mr. Kalman’s going to offer me a glass of cold water, maybe a snack.
Instead he leaves me a present on his front stoop.
A bag of trash.
And next to that he puts a box of old newspapers with a note on it: “Blue Bin.”
Now I’m his gardener and his garbage boy. Soon I become his television repairman, too.
“I’m not getting PBS,” he says through the window.
“It’s channel twenty-eight, but your TV has to be on three,” I tell him.
“It is on three. If you don’t believe me, come have a look.”
I go inside, past the piano that hasn’t been played in years, and notice a collection of framed photographs on top of the piano. There’s one of Mr. Kalman as a much younger man dressed in a suit and tie, with Mrs. Kalman in a fancy white dress. In other pictures, I see him standing with children and teenagers—not his own, I think, because they don’t look at all like him. Unless they’re adopted. There are Asian kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, white kids. All of them dressed up, too, like for graduation.
“Your kids, Mr. Kalman?”
“Friends. From long ago. Now, why isn’t my TV working?”
I look at his TV. The cable box is set to 3 and the TV is on 28.
“You’ve got them backwards,” I say, beginning to wonder if he’d be the best lawyer after all. “The TV stays on three.”
I set things straight for him and flip on the TV just to be sure. It’s a weekday morning, and Arthur is on.
“I used to love that show,” I say. “Reminds me of the good old days when I didn’t have homework!”
But I’m suspended and probably shouldn’t be watching Arthur, so I shut it off.
“When you want to turn off the TV,” I remind him, “do it at the set. This is just for channels.”
I hand him the remote and start to go.
“It won’t work,” he says.
“It will if you promise to leave the slider switch all the way to the right, on cable.”
“I don’t mean the TV. I mean all of this. The chores. The unsolicited help. It won’t get me to take your case.”
He pulls out his wallet.
“You’ve done a little over three hours of work around here. At the proposed California minimum wage of fifteen bucks an hour, that’s forty-five dollars.”
He holds out a fifty-dollar bill to me.
“I don’t want your money, Mr. Kalman.”
“I don’t want your charity, Sam. Take it. And stop coming over here.”
Mr. Kalman has blue eyes. Blue eyes can be warm and sparkly and remind you of the sea on a clear day. Or they can be a pair of icicles that make you want to look away.
I look away.
But first I pluck the fifty from his hand.
“Now go on home,” he says.
“That’s exactly where I’m headed. See . . . I’m walking out your squeaky door . . . picking up my dad’s tools . . . heading down your crumbly path . . .”
I swing open the gate.
“Through your wobbly gate now . . . stepping over the paint chips . . . past your crooked mailbox . . . across the street . . . and home!”
I slam our front door. Lucy and Mollie start to yip. I hope they keep it up all the way through his nap.
I spend the rest of the day plowing through to the end of Alistair’s Homework Hit List. By the time Mom comes in to say good night, my brain is exhausted, my butt is exhausted, my hand is exhausted.
“Did you write the apology to Mr. Hill?”
“I will, Mom,” I say. “I promise. But right now I need to sleep.”
I tap my cell phone. The Meditation Lady tells me to breathe.
Saturday morning, something—I don’t know what—wakes me early. I look out the window, across the street, to Mr. Kalman’s. Since I trimmed his branches back, you can see his fence, and it’s looking pretty shabby. I guess nobody’s touched it in five years.
I put on my shoes and walk the dogs around the block. All the other front yards are tidy behind clean, well-kept fences. Ours is too, in the same shade of white Mrs. Kalman used to paint hers.
It was a running joke between her and Dad. Every year they’d talk about changing the color. Every year they’d end up sticking with white.
We’ve still got gallons of that paint in the shed.
Mr. Kalman told me to stay away from his house. But the fence is at the property line and faces the street. Besides, it’s not even his fence.
He never took care of it.
She did.
I start at six o’clock and make my way slowly along the outside, the street side, first. By eleven I peek in through his living room window and see him in his recliner with his glasses on. He’s watching PBS.
By two o’clock I’ve made it all the way around the inside, and all that’s left is the gate. I give it a nice clean coat. Soon I hear the mail truck squeak to a stop in front of our house. The engine purrs there for thirty seconds, which means a lot of mail in our box today. Finally I hear the mailbox door clap shut and the truck drive away.
Sadie must’ve heard it too. She comes out of our house, sees me across the street with a paintbrush in my hand, and just shakes her head like I’m an idiot.
She unloads the mail. Unloads more mail. Unloads more mail. I didn’t know our box was that big.
Finally she reaches the end. She opens one of the envelopes, and her face goes all frowny.
She opens another. And another. And with each one, I see her face getting tighter, madder, and, well, frownier.
She looks up. Her twin lasers land on Mr. Kalman’s house.
Sadie barrels across the street and kicks open the gate. She marches up to the front door and pounds louder than his TV.
Mr. Kalman opens fast, as if he was hoping for her knock.
“Did the mail come?”
She reads out loud from a brochure in her hand. “Blue Ridge Academy is a therapeutic wilderness program for teens aged thirteen to seventeen who are struggling with defiant behavior or other emotional issues.”
She reads another. “Island View is a residential treatment center for teenage girls that focuses on oppositional behaviors.”
Mr. Kalman just stands there, grinning.
“You sent them?!”
“You’d be surprised what one phone call can accomplish in the twenty-first century.”
Now I really want this guy to be my lawyer!
“It’s not funny, Mr. Kalman.”
“Neither is this.”
He holds up his stack from the retirement homes.
“I guess we’re even,” Sadie says.
“I guess so,” he says, tossing the retirement home brochures onto his bench. That’s when he looks past her and sees me standing at the gate with a wet paintbrush in my hand.
“I thought I said no more chores.”
He comes out onto his porch and down the steps like he’s about to run me off his land, or worse. But before he gets to me, he notices the fence.
White the way it used to be. The way it hasn’t been in five years.
The fresh paint stops him cold.
“I didn’t do it for you,” I say. “I did it for her.”
“Her?”
“Mrs. Kalman. She let me help her once, when I was too small to see over the top.”
He walks slowly along the whole inside. He leans over the top to see the whole outside. When he turns back to me, he looks pale. Like instead of seeing a fence, he just saw a ghost.
“Why did you do it?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Because it needed to be done, I guess. And because you can’t do it yourself.”
He brings his hand to his forehead. Also to his eyes. The color in his face comes flooding back. From anger or something else, I can’t tell.
Then, pointing to the gate, he says, “You missed a spot.”
“That’s Sadie’s fault. It’s where she kicked it open.”
He glances at her purple Vans. Purple with a white smudge. He comes over to me, takes the paintbrush out of my hand, dips it in the tray, and leans low to touch up the gate.
He takes his time.
When he’s done, he says, “I can’t promise we’ll win.”
“What?”
“I can’t even promise we’ll get on the docket.”
“Huh?”
He stands up now and looks straight at us. “If you still want me to, I’d like to file a lawsuit on your behalf, Sam. Against the Board of Education.”
“Why, Mr. Kalman?”
“Because it needs to be done. And you can’t do it yourself.”
“You mean it?” I say. “You’ll be my lawyer?”
“Yes, Sam, I’ll be your lawyer.”
Sadie and I have the same urge to throw our arms around Mr. Kalman. But too big a hug might tip him over, and that would be the end of our lawsuit. So instead we pat him warmly about twenty times on each shoulder.
He turns to Sadie. “We’re going to need some help.”