The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

He just said those three sentences and then he reached down and turned the key, and the mower started up again, and he went on up the hill.

Brent stood there in the middle of his mother’s yard for a long time. I watched him.

I watched him look up the hill at the fresh stripes and the path curving around the steep spot to his daddy’s stone.

Then Nell came out on the porch.

She didn’t wave. She didn’t call to him. She just stood there in her housedress with one hand on the porch post and looked at her son, the way she used to look at him when he came in from school with a bad report card folded up in his pocket.

Brent turned and looked at her. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and nothing came out.

Then he went back to his truck and got in and drove down the lane.

He had to pass me at the gate. I was still standing there with my hand on the post.

He slowed down, and for the second time in a week, my ex-husband and I looked at each other through his truck window.

This time I saw his face clearly. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who has been caught at something and knows it, and knows that everyone who saw it knows it, and has nowhere left to go but home.

He didn’t stop. He drove on out to the county road and turned toward town, and I stood there with the bucket of strawberries and watched the dust settle.

I went on up to the house. Nell was still on the porch. She had sat down in her rocker and she had her hands folded in her lap.

“I brought you some strawberries,” I said.

“That’s nice, honey,” she said. She didn’t ask whether I had seen. She knew I had.

We sat there together and listened to Lonzo’s mower going up and down the hill. After a while she said, very quietly, “He was always a tender-hearted boy. That was the trouble with him. He’d rather run from a thing than look at it.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. She knew her son better than anyone, and I knew him second best, and we were both right.

The next day was Sunday. Brent was not at church, but then he hadn’t been at our church since he moved to Christiansburg.

Nell and I sat in our pew and sang the old hymns and nobody said a word about Saturday.

After church, I drove Nell home and stayed for dinner, the way I usually do.

She had put a pot roast in before we left, and the whole house smelled like onions and carrots and black pepper.

We were sitting on the porch afterward with our iced tea, about two in the afternoon, when I heard a truck turning up the lane.

And I heard something else, too, rattling behind it. A trailer.

It was Brent. He had a flatbed trailer hitched up behind the pickup, and on the trailer, strapped down with two yellow ratchet straps, was Pop’s green lawn tractor.

Nell set her glass down on the porch rail. She didn’t get up.

Brent pulled the truck around by the shed, the way Pop used to pull in, and backed the trailer up to the shed door.