The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

Norma

Norma Tackett is Duane’s mother. She is sixty-four, a widow, and she lives on two acres a quarter mile down our road in a small white farmhouse with a front porch and a clothesline and a big white oak by the mailbox.

I want to be fair to her, because I was not always fair to her in my head that summer.

She raised Duane and his brother mostly alone after their daddy died in a mine roof fall. She did not have one lazy bone in her body, and she did not trust anybody who did.

She also did not trust doctors. She took her blood pressure pills because her preacher’s wife made her, and she drank apple cider vinegar every morning, and she had a cabinet full of things in little brown bottles that she ordered off the radio.

When I got my diagnosis, Norma came up the road with a casserole and a printed article about turmeric. I thanked her for both. I ate the casserole.

All spring and into the summer she came over on my bad days to “help.” Sometimes that meant she folded laundry and fed Riley supper. Sometimes it meant she stood in my living room and told me I looked like death and asked if I had tried juicing.

I let it go. I let a lot go. She was Duane’s mother, and she was Riley’s only grandmother, my own mama having passed when I was twenty, and I did not have enough strength that summer to spend any of it fighting.

The day she helped

The third day after an infusion was always my worst. It came on like the flu and a hangover and a stomach virus all at once, and on those days I did not leave the couch except to be sick.

That Wednesday Norma came up around ten. I heard her car in the gravel and closed my eyes.

She talked to me for a while and I mostly nodded. Then she started cleaning, which she did whether you asked her to or not.

I slept. When I woke up it was going on four, and the house smelled like pine cleaner, and through the window I could see a thin line of smoke going up from the burn barrel behind the shed.

She came in and stood over me with her hands on her hips. “I got all your junk mail and trash burnt,” she said. “Your counters were a sight. You’ve got that girl living in a pigpen.”

“Thank you, Norma,” I said, and I meant it, mostly.

At six I got up to eat a few crackers and take my evening dose. The bottle was not on the counter by the coffee maker where it always sat.

It was not in the cabinet. It was not in my purse or the bathroom or the nightstand.

I took the phone out on the back steps and called her. My hands were already shaking.

“Norma, did you move my pill bottle? The orange one by the coffee pot?”

There was a little quiet on the line. Then she said, plain as if she were telling me what time it was, “I threw that out, Robin. I burned it with the trash.”

I sat down hard on the top step. I could not have stood if you paid me.

“That was my chemo,” I said.

“I know what it was,” she said. “That stuff is poison. It’s what killed Jean. Nature cures cancer if you let it. You put that poison in you and it eats you from the inside. I’m not going to stand by and watch it.”

I did not yell. I could not have yelled. I said, “Norma, that bottle was three thousand dollars,” and she said, “Then they robbed you,” and she hung up.