The old woman says she moved here from Ireland, a long time ago, because her brother claimed there was a man in America who would marry her. “It was a load of bunk. There was a man looking to marry, but he wasn’t like Tom said.” She tells Rodney how everyone in her family insisted she was an ugly girl and should be happy to have a husband at all, even if he did mistreat her. Her husband died forty years ago, so it worked out in the end.
“Tell me about yourself,” the old woman says. “Your mother never said much.” Rodney sits up in his chair and looks at the old woman. “Tell me,” she says. “What do you do for a living?”
Rodney looks back at the television for a time, pretending to watch the game. “I’d rather not tell you,” he says.
“Don’t worry. There isn’t much that surprises me anymore, if it makes you feel better to know that.”
“I don’t bother no one,” he says. “I live alone.”
Rodney watches the old women pop the plastic dome back on the cake and set it near his jacket so he’ll take it home. He senses the warm feeling surge through him again as he watches her fuss over cleaning the spatula and the plastic fork.
It’s then that Rodney tells the old woman he’s a gospel singer.
“Is that right?” she asks, her voice rising with surprise. “A singer?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rodney mutters. “It’s for a bunch of churches in Omaha. I do the solos.”
“I don’t believe it,” the woman says.
Rodney flinches, half-smiling to cover his nerves. “It’s true,” he says.
“Did your mother know?”
Rodney hesitates and looks to the ceiling, his shoulders dropping. “I couldn’t say. We didn’t talk about it. Not about work. She did love to hear me sing, I know that.”
“She never mentioned it to me,” the old woman says. For a long time she looks at Rodney, her head crooked, staring at his mouth, his neck, as if imaging what he’d look like standing at the front of a church straining to belt out some high-arcing gospel. “Would you sing for me?” she asks.
“Now?”
“You could sing a hymn. What do you know?” she asks, pinching a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Have you ever sung ‘All is Well with My Soul’? Of course you have, that’s a standard.”
Rodney pauses, looks back at the TV. “I’m not sure,” he says.
“Well, don’t you know that one?”
Rodney nods his head — and it’s true, he knows the hymn. That was one thing his mother always liked to do. On Sundays, even if they didn’t go to church, they would sit in the front room at the piano and sing. Rodney learned many hymns this way, his hand on his mother’s back as she sat at the piano to play the accompaniment.
“Well, if you know it.” The old woman touches his arm with her long fingers. “Will wonders never cease,” she says. “A gospel singer.”
Rodney looks away from her before he starts singing the hymn. It’s the warm feeling that makes him think he can do it — even though it’s been a long time since he’s tried to sing — and because the old woman asked him to.
His voice croaks when he begins, falling into a lower register, and then higher, unable to find or hold a note, until he stops to clear his throat.
“Try again,” the woman says. She closes the door then returns to the edge of the bed.
“When peace flows like a river, attending my way. When sorrows like the ocean roil below. I will say to my Lord, it is well.”
Rodney thinks he remembers the hymn, the lyrics are mostly right, but his voice falters again. His tone is off, flat then sharp, then he’s not really singing at all, but only humming the tune to himself, a word popping out now and then, until his noise peters off. He stares at the corner of the room, his whole body trembling to keep from letting out his regret.
Rodney hears the old woman. She’s weeping. Rodney looks and sees her eyes water.
“I’m sorry I made you cry,” he says. “This was the wrong thing to do.”
“No, no. It’s a beautiful hymn!”
Rodney moves to the woman and puts a hand on her back. “I shouldn’t have said anything about being a singer.”
“It was beautiful,” the old woman repeats. She shudders when Rodney embraces her, they both do, his arms under hers again, his face on her shoulder.
“I’m glad you sung it. You’ve done all right.”
It’s six a.m. when his train pulls into Omaha. As he walks to the Kellogg Rooming House, the plastic bubble with the cake held in front, Rodney thinks about how he’ll never see the old woman again. It doesn’t upset him that he lied to her about being a gospel singer. He wanted to make her feel better. It was his mother’s funeral, after all, the funeral of this old woman’s best friend.
His room looks empty when he gets back to the Kellogg, but this doesn’t bother him either. Rodney takes off the green suit and returns it to its spot in his closet. He stands there in his underwear for a little while then puts on his work pants, changes his undershirt, lies gently on the bed with his hands behind his head as he looks out the window.
There wasn’t much time to grab his things from his girl’s house this last time they broke up, before she came back from her job. Her brother stood in the living room watching him.
“C’mon, man. You know I won’t take nothing isn’t mine.”
“I know it,” his girl’s brother said, arms crossed over his chest. “But she asked me to. She said to stand here and supervise, so that’s what I got to do. She’s my baby sister.”
“You don’t have to do nothing you don’t want to,” Rodney said. He kicked a box across the floor but regretted doing it. It wasn’t her brother’s fault that he had to watch. Things just hadn’t worked out between Rodney and his girl, that was the problem.
Most all he has now are clothes and most of them are ratty. Olive work pants the city gives him, a bunch of tee shirts. Rodney mows grass in parks and vacant lots, around abandoned houses. He has a hot plate in his room, on a table next to his bed because he likes to cook lying down. There’s a pine closet that sticks out from the wall by the door and his bed is angled so he can look out the window. His girl had a TV and she paid for cable. Rodney kind of misses watching what was on each night, most of all in the summer after mowing was finished. He misses lying on the couch with his girl too, even though he won’t let himself miss her. Most of the time it’s more comfortable to be alone, that’s how he sees it. Rodney’s legs are hot and he doesn’t like being shut up in a room with somebody else whose legs might also be hot. They’d make things worse for each other.
His room at the Kellogg has a big window, which is what he watches after work now, the downtown buildings reflecting the last light of sunset. And then the fluorescent lights of the offices pop on after a while. It’s a drowsy happiness this gives him.
In the morning he sits outside on the edge of a flower box and waits to be picked up and taken to where he will work for the day. Rodney has mowed for the city a long time, fifteen years or more. The man Rodney works with has learned a lot about him over the years, but even he doesn’t know Rodney’s mother was a white lady, that she came from Hastings and moved east to work for Mutual of Omaha in the fifties. She held more than a few jobs for them, over three decades, all clerical, before there were computers on every desk. Rodney’s father worked at Mutual too, that’s how they met. He was a custodian. They lived together for a few years in the Leavenworth neighborhood. It wasn’t such a great place to live, just as the Kellogg isn’t now, because there were junkies on the sidewalks and slumlords let most of the houses go to shit. But the people who lived there would let you be. They wouldn’t hassle you for doing things differently than most folks wanted you to. Rodney knew this. He understood.