The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

Our town is small enough that everybody with a lawn worth mowing already knows everybody with a mower worth hiring, so word got around fast. By that second June, Wyatt had eleven steady yards strung along County Road 400 and two more streets into town once you crossed the bridge by the grain elevator, the Hoskins place with its half acre of fescue, the Petries who always had sweet tea waiting on the porch rail whether he wanted it or not, and old Mrs. Feagin, who is eighty three and lives alone since her husband passed, and who paid him an extra five dollars every single week just to carry her trash cans back up from the road, though both of us know she could manage that errand herself if she had to. Some jobs a boy does for the money. Some you let him do for the company, and you pay him anyway so neither one of you has to say that out loud.

He ran that mower six days a week rain permitting and kept every dollar in a coffee can on the shelf in his closet, a Folgers can with the lid pressed back on, because that is where his father had kept money at that age too, and some things in a family just repeat themselves without anybody deciding they should.

I knew the can was there. I had helped him count it in July, sitting on his bedroom floor sorting the bills by denomination the way you’d sort canning jars, and it had been a hundred and ninety dollars then, and I had told him he was going to be a rich man by Labor Day. He had grinned at me the way he still grins, gap where the molar is still coming in, and said he had plans for it, and I had not asked what plans, because what business is it of a grandmother’s what a boy means to do with money he earned pushing a mower in ninety degree heat.

That is the first thing I have to admit to you plainly, because somebody reading this is going to ask it before I finish: why didn’t I just ask him. I did ask him. Once. The last Saturday in September I noticed the can was light, lighter than it should have been with three more weeks of mowing left in the season, and I asked him straight out where the money had gone. He looked at his shoes and said, “It’s spent, Grandma, and it’s spent right,” and would not say another word, and Dale, who was fixing a fence post out the window, said, “Lois, let the boy have his own business,” and that was that. We do not interrogate kindness in this family. If pressing him had meant making him explain somebody else’s shame out loud before he was ready to, then I would rather not have known for one more month than make him do that. I have thought since that it was the hardest thing I have ever not asked, and I do not regret it.