My uncle finally kicked me out, and I was living in the twenty-four-hour Kroger on Fairhaven Avenue in Tustin, California, pilfering food and sleeping at the coffee bar. One day Mr. Muniz pushed a cart through the frozen-foods section where I was fanning myself, and he stopped. I’d gotten ugly, my face wasn’t right, and I could tell he was thinking, What the hell?
He was white-haired, hunched over with a bowling-ball-sized hump between his shoulder blades. At the Chevron, before I got fired, he would put a gallon in his Camry, chew wasabi almonds, and talk my ear off over the counter. Now in the Kroger all he said was “Haden, son, come cut my grass.” And I did. I obeyed. He lived on Lemon Street — not far. His mower was a relic, but I figured it out, got it roaring. Pretty soon I was sweating like a horse and relieved by how normal I felt, pushing that loud machine up and down the backyard. I worked conscientiously — weird — and the next-door neighbor, watching out her window, hollered over, “Do mine while you’re at it.” So I did, and when I was finished, Mr. Muniz, this almond-chomper, growth on his back, who at the Chevron I used to wish he would shut up and get the hell out, said, “Keep the mower. Take the rake and the blower, too, and start yourself a little business.” He loaned me money to fix my Tacoma — radiator and new hoses — and by word of mouth I built up a lawn service: mowing, trimming bushes, blowing leaves, edging sidewalks, fixing sprinklers. I had twenty-one houses at a hundred bucks a month, so I was surviving, sharing a Santa Ana apartment with two strangers on the other side of the 55 freeway.
