The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

The driveway

Duane got home at a quarter to eight. I had not called him at work. You do not call a man on a twelve-hour shift at a power plant and tell him something like that.

But Norma did not wait for me to tell him. She must have watched for his truck from her porch, because his headlights had barely turned into our gravel when her car came up the road behind him and pulled in at an angle.

I was sitting on the front steps by then. I could not stand the smell of pine cleaner in the house.

I watched her get out and walk over to his truck before he even had his lunch box out of the cab.

“I need to talk to you, son,” she said. She did not lower her voice. “Your wife lays on that couch all day long while you work yourself into the ground. All day. I was there. She’s lazy, Duane. She’s letting that poison make her lazy, and you’re letting her.”

Duane stood there with the lunch box in his hand. He had grease to his elbows and he had been up since four in the morning.

“Mama,” he said. “She has cancer.”

“She has a couch,” Norma said. “I raised two boys alone on a widow’s check, and I never laid down one day of it.”

I watched my husband set the lunch box on the hood of his truck very carefully, the way a man sets something down when he does not trust what his hands want to do.

“You will not talk about my wife that way,” he said. “Not to me and not to anybody. You threw her medicine in a fire. Go home, Mama.”

She looked at him a long time. Then she looked over at me on the steps, and I will never forget that look, because I thought at the time it was disgust, and I found out later it was something else. She got in her car and backed out and drove home.

Why I did not go to war

Duane wanted to walk down there that night. He said a few things about his mother standing in our driveway that I will not write down, because he did not mean them and he would be ashamed to see them.

I asked him not to go. I asked him to sit with me on the steps instead, and he did, and the cicadas were so loud we could hardly hear each other.

“She’s your mama,” I said. “She’s Riley’s only grandma. I can’t fight her right now, Duane. I can barely walk to the mailbox. If we go to war with her, I’ll lose, because I don’t have anything left to fight with.”

“You don’t have to fight her,” he said. “I will.”

“Then Riley loses her grandma,” I said. “And she’s already scared enough.”

He sat with that a long time. Then he put his arm around me and said, “All right. But she does not come up here again until you say so.”

I said that was fair. And I did not know yet what I was going to do. I only knew that I was not going to do it while I was lying down.