The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

What I said

I could have said a lot of things. I had been saying them in my head for two weeks, lying on the couch and on hold with the insurance.

I had a whole speech, with the six missed doses in it and the four hundred and eighty dollars and the word lazy underlined.

I found I did not want to say any of it.

“Norma,” I said, “I’m not lazy, and I’m not Jean. I lay on that couch because some days that is what this fight looks like. And some days it looks like this.” I nodded out at the stripes. “I need you to let me have both.”

She nodded. She did not trust her voice, I think.

“I’m going to need help,” I said. “Real help. Somebody to drive me when Duane can’t get off. Somebody to sit with Riley. Somebody who’s not going to throw my medicine in the fire.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I swear to you on Jean, I won’t.”

“Then that’s all right,” I said.

We sat there on the steps a while longer, the three of us. The sun went down behind the ridge and the haze turned orange, and the first lightning bugs came up out of the cut grass all over the yard.

Riley got up and chased a few of them, the way she did when she was six.

Norma said, without looking at me, “It does look nice.”

“It does,” I said.

Duane

Duane came home at a quarter to eight and found our gravel empty and the mower gone from the shed.

He drove down the road with his heart in his throat, he told me later, and turned into his mother’s yard and stopped dead with his headlights shining across two acres of fresh stripes.

His mother and his wife were sitting on the porch steps together. His daughter was in the yard catching lightning bugs in a jelly jar.

He got out of the truck and stood there with his lunch box in his hand, the same as that night in our driveway.

“What in the world,” he said.

“Your wife mowed my yard,” Norma said. “On her chemo week. I watched her do it.”

Duane looked at me. I lifted my shoulders.

He walked over slow and stood in front of his mother. She looked up at him, and her eyes were red, and she said, “I told her I was sorry, son. I’m telling you too. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Duane is not a man for speeches. He set his lunch box down on the step. Then he bent down and put his arms around his mother, grease and coal dust and all, and held on.

I heard her say something into his shoulder that I did not catch, and I did not ask.

Duane drove the mower home that night at a crawl along the shoulder, and Riley and I rode with Norma in her car, the quarter mile up the road.

She did not say anything the whole way. When she let us out, she reached over and squeezed my hand once, hard, and then let go.