His grandmother looked me over, said something in Hmong, and Tou laughed. "She says you're the one with the truck that Mrs. V hates."
"Tell her I'm honored to be in such company."
He translated. His grandmother laughed, a short delighted cackle, and pressed a fat bundle of mustard greens into my hands, and then she said something longer, and Tou's face changed.
"What'd she say?"
He hesitated. "She asked if you knew Mr. Esau. The old man who lived in your house."
"I didn't. The agent said he went into care."
Tou translated that, and his grandmother made a sound in her throat that didn't need translating. She said something else. Tou said, "She says he didn't go into care. He went to his daughter's in Greensboro because they took the house. She says first it was the police, coming and coming, and then it was the HOA, and then it was gone." He shrugged, embarrassed. "She says the same people come here. The police. Mrs. V calls them about the garden. Says it's 'unsanitary.' They come and they look and they leave. It's happened, like, six or seven times this summer."
"Did anyone write you a ticket?"
"No. They just come. Grandma gets scared. She doesn't understand what they want. Last time she thought they were going to take her to jail." He looked at the dish tub of greens. "My mom wants her to tear it all out. Just so they stop coming."
I stood there holding the mustard greens and I didn't say anything for a while, because what I wanted to say was something a police chief would say, and I wasn't one yet, and I didn't know enough. So I thanked Pa Houa Lor for the greens, and I went home, and I cooked them that night with a ham hock the way Lorenzo's mother taught me, and my father ate two helpings and said they tasted like 1962.