“He said I’m too old to be on a mower anyway,” Nell told me, and she snapped a pea pod in half like that settled it. “He’s probably right, Danette. Don’t fuss.”
I was standing at the bottom of her porch steps in my bus driver lanyard, and the grass beside me came up past my knees.
It was the second week of June in Floyd County, and her yard looked like a hayfield nobody had gotten around to cutting.
I had seen it from the bus window not twenty minutes before. I drive the summer school route for the county, a short loop with eleven kids on it, and the road runs right past the Hylton place on the way back to the lot.
From the road, you can see the whole hillside. The little white farmhouse sits at the bottom, the shed and the old corn crib off to one side, and the yard runs up and up toward one big shade tree and a few old headstones on the crest.
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There is a path that goes up that hill. Or there was. It is a mower’s width wide and it curves around the steep spot and comes out at the family stones, where Pop’s parents are, and since 2016, where Pop is.
That Thursday, the path was gone. Not shaggy. Gone. The grass had closed over it like water closes over a dropped stone, and I nearly missed my turn looking at it.
So after I dropped the last child at the end of his gravel drive and parked the bus, I got in my own car and drove straight back out there.
Nell was on the porch in her blue housedress with a dishpan of peas in her lap.
“Where’s the mower, Nell?” I asked her.
She didn’t look up. She kept working the peas with her thumb, the way she has done every June for as long as I have known her, which is twenty-six years.
“Brent came and got it in May,” she said. “His wife wants a bigger yard kept. Their new place has an acre and a half and he says the little push one won’t do it.”
I stood there a minute. Then I asked her the only question that mattered. “Did he say who was going to mow yours?”
“He said I’m too old to be on a mower anyway.” That was when she snapped the pod. “He’s probably right. Don’t fuss, honey. It’s only grass.”
It was not only grass. I knew it and she knew it, and that was why she would not look at me.
I need to tell you who Nell Hylton is to me, because on paper she is nothing anymore.
I was married to her son Brent for twenty-two years. Three years ago he moved out, and a year after that he married a woman from Christiansburg.
The divorce papers say Nell is my former mother-in-law. I have never once called her that. She is Nell.
She taught me to can tomatoes and put up green beans and make biscuits in a cast iron skillet that belonged to her own mother.
When my mama died, the year Brent and I were married, Nell sat with me on the back steps of the funeral home and held my hand for two hours without saying anything at all.
I never forgot that. You don’t forget a thing like that.