The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

The big sixty-inch mower coughed twice, ran rough for about ten seconds, and then quit dead in the middle of the first yard on my Monday list, a corner lot in Smithville with a split-rail fence.

I sat on the seat in the sudden quiet with the smell of cut grass and hot engine all around me.

It was ten minutes after seven on a Monday in June, and the dew was just starting to burn off.

Across the yard my son Jarrell was on the fifty-two-inch.

I watched his machine bog down the same way, the engine surging and sagging like it could not get its breath, and then it stopped too.

Two mowers, the same morning, the same five minutes. I have run commercial zero-turns for eight years, and I knew right then it was not bad luck. Bad luck does not usually come in pairs.

Jarrell climbed off and walked over, wiping his hands on his black shorts.

He is fifteen, tall and thin as a fence post, and he does not waste words on anything. “Both of them, Mom?”

“Both of them,” I said. I got the toolbox out of the truck, pinched off the fuel line on mine and pulled the little clear fuel filter loose so I could hold it up to the light.

It was packed solid with fine tan grit, like the bottom of a sandbox.

I tapped it against my palm and a little pile of it came out, pale and gritty, the kind of sand that has never seen a creek bed.

That was when the white car came down the street.

It slowed in front of the split-rail fence until it was barely rolling, and the driver’s window came down. My ex-husband’s new wife looked at me over her sunglasses.

“Trouble?” Kristal said. She did not wait for an answer.

“My offer is good until Friday, Cami. Five thousand for the list. Tanner can start Monday.” Then the window went back up and she drove on.

I stood there in a customer’s yard with a fuel filter full of sand in one hand and watched her car turn the corner by the post office.

Jarrell stood beside me. Neither one of us said a word for a long while.