Late August on Route 31 smells like cut grass and fruit stands, and the light goes gold over the fields well before supper. Fred J Services works the lawns in between — farmhouse yards, village lots, the long roadside strips nobody else wants to trim. Mowing, string trimming around posts and mailboxes, edging the walks, hauling off the leaves when the maples finally let go in November. Royalton is farm country with a great deal of open sky, so a lawn out here gets seen from the road at fifty-five miles an hour and it ought to look right at that speed. After they leave, it does.