The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

The steps

It was six o’clock. Time for my evening dose.

I got off the mower. My legs did not want to hold me. Then I walked across the yard to Norma’s front porch and sat down on the second step from the bottom, with Riley’s backpack beside me.

Riley sat down on the bottom step. She did not say anything.

I opened the pack of peanut butter crackers and ate all six of them slow, because the tablets have to go down on food.

Then I took the little pill case out of my jeans pocket and opened it and shook the three peach-colored tablets into my palm.

I did not look at the window. I did not hold them up for show.

I just sat there on my mother-in-law’s front steps in the heat, with the smell of the cut grass all around, and I unscrewed the water bottle.

Behind me, the screen door creaked.

I heard her house shoes on the porch boards. They came across slow and stopped right behind me, at the top of the steps. I could hear her breathing.

I put the tablets in my mouth and drank, the whole long swallow of water, and set the bottle down.

What Norma said

For a long time she did not say anything at all.

Then she came down the steps, one at a time, holding the rail. She sat down on the step beside me, which I had never in fifteen years seen her do, sit on a step in her house dress like that.

She looked out at her yard. At the stripes. At the clean line along the fence and the tight circle around the oak.

“Your edges are better than that church boy’s,” she said.

“My daddy taught me,” I said.

She was quiet again. Riley sat on the step below us, not moving, the way children do when they know grown people are about to say something that matters.

“I stood at that window two hours,” Norma said. “I kept telling myself to come out here and make you stop. Every time I put my hand on the door I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of one thing to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said.

“Yes I do.” She folded her hands in her lap. They were shaking. “You know about my sister Jean.”

I knew a little. Jean was her baby sister, ten years younger, who lived over in Ashland. She had died the year Duane and I married. Nobody in the family talked about it much.

“Jean got sick at forty-one,” Norma said. “Cancer in her pancreas. They started her on the chemo, and I drove her every week, and every week she was smaller. She couldn’t eat. She was gone eleven weeks after she started. Eleven weeks, Robin. I sat there and watched that stuff go into her arm, and I watched her die of it.”

I did not tell her what I suspected, that Jean’s cancer was probably far along before anybody caught it, and that the chemo did not kill her. It was not the time. She was not asking me.

“When Duane told me about you,” Norma said, “I went home and I couldn’t breathe. I thought, I’m going to watch it again. I’m going to drive her every week and watch her get smaller, and this time it’s my boy’s wife, and my grandbaby’s mama.”

Her voice broke. She stopped and got hold of it.

“So I read everything I could find,” she said. “I told myself if I could just get that poison away from you, you’d have a chance. And when I came up there and saw you on that couch, day after day, not able to lift your head, I thought, it’s already happening. It’s eating her just like it ate Jean.”

“So you called me lazy,” I said. Not mean. Just saying it.

“I called you lazy,” she said, “because if you were lazy, you weren’t dying.”

I sat there on the step, and the pill was going down in me, and I did not know what to say to that.

“I was wrong,” Norma said. “I was wrong to burn your medicine. I was wrong in the driveway. I was wrong to say it in front of my son. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I was scared to death.”

Riley turned around on the bottom step and looked up at her grandmother.

“Mama’s not dying,” she said. “She’s fighting.”

Norma looked at her a long time. Then she reached down and put her hand on Riley’s head, on her sweaty hair, and left it there.

“I see that now,” she said. She looked out at the yard again. “Lord help me, I see it.”