Fourteen Kids at the County Pool

Forty One Lawns

Logan took that $310 like it was a mountain he had been told to move with a spoon.

He already had a little business going. That spring I’d helped him buy a used self-propelled Toro off a widow out by Hooper for a hundred and twenty dollars.

He charged fifteen dollars a yard for most of them, twenty for the corner lots and the two on Fourth Street with the steep ditches. He wrote every job in a spiral notebook in pencil.

Between the first of May and the middle of June, that notebook shows forty-one lawns. Forty-one. Some were the same yards twice.

He mowed for Mrs. Kowalski, who is eighty-eight and pays in quarters she keeps in a coffee can.

He mowed in the rain once, which I told him not to do. He came home soaked with a twenty folded in his fist like he’d won the lottery.

My wife, Karen, works as a CNA at the care center in town. More than once that spring she came home after dark and found Logan asleep at the kitchen table with the notebook open in front of him, adding up the column again.

On the twelfth of June he counted it all out. He had $642 after gas and a new blade. He put $310 in a white envelope, wrote Dahl on the front in his careful block letters, and asked me to walk over with him.

I told him to hand it over himself. He did. Craig took the envelope at the front door and shook his hand like he was a grown man. I remember being proud of both of them.

“You’re in, bud,” Craig told him. “Anytime Tanner’s home. Just knock on the back gate.”

Logan swam over there four times in the next week. He’d come home with his eyes red from the chlorine and his hair sticking straight up, talking about how Tanner could do a flip off the side now.

Then came the Wednesday.