The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

Riley

At a quarter after four I heard the bus.

It came grinding up the road, yellow and familiar, and stopped at the end of our gravel a quarter mile up. Mr. Pruitt honked twice, which he never did, and I realized he had seen me in Norma’s yard.

Riley got off and stood there in the road with her backpack on, looking down toward me. Then she started walking. She did not go home.

She came straight down the shoulder to her grandmother’s yard and stood at the edge of the cut grass with her backpack strap in her fist.

I stopped the mower beside her and shut the blade off.

“Mama,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Mowing your grandma’s yard,” I said.

She looked at the stripes. She looked at the house, where the curtain was pulled back.

She looked at me, at the grass on my arms and the sweat on my face. She was quiet a long time, the way her daddy gets quiet.

“Does Daddy know?”

“Daddy’s at work,” I said. “He’ll know tonight.”

“Can I help?”

I told her she could carry the water bottle and pick up sticks ahead of the mower.

So she dropped her backpack on the porch steps and walked ahead of me, bending and picking up sticks and throwing them in a pile by the shed. Every few passes she brought me the water bottle without being asked.

The last row

By a quarter till six there was one strip left, along the front of the porch, maybe sixty feet long.

I stopped at the end of it and looked at Riley, who was standing in the cut grass with a handful of sticks and her face all red from the heat.

I am her mother and a school bus driver, and I have told a thousand children to stay back from moving equipment. So I throttled the engine down as low as it would go and said, “Walk with me, baby. Stay up by my hand.”

She dropped her sticks and came up on the cut side, well clear of the deck, and put her hand on my arm where it rested on the fender, and we went down that last row at the speed of a slow walk, the two of us, with the blade humming and the porch going by on our right.

She kept her hand on my arm the whole way. Halfway down she said, real soft, so I almost did not hear it over the engine, “You’re not lazy, Mama.”

I could not answer her. I just held on.

At the end of the row I shut everything off, and it was so quiet all of a sudden I could hear the cicadas start up again in the oak.

Riley let go of my arm. I sat there a minute with my hands in my lap, looking out at two acres of neat green stripes running all the way down to the road.