The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

She came all the way up to the step and knocked, and she had an envelope in her hand.

“Eleven hundred and forty,” she said, and held it out. Her voice was steady, but her hand was not.

“It was a wrong thing to do. I know it was. I was so scared for Tanner I couldn’t see straight, and I took it out on you.”

I took the envelope. “How is Tanner?”

“He got on at a tire shop in Wooster,” she said.

“He started last week. He likes it. He didn’t know anything about what I did, Cami. I want you to know that. He’d never have let me.”

“I hope it goes well for him,” I said, and I meant it. “I mean that. He’s a young man, and he has time.”

She nodded. She stood there a second longer like she had something else to say, and then she did not say it, and she walked back across the gravel to her car.

I watched her go. I did not feel like I had won anything. I just felt like it was over.

That fall Dorothea’s bridge club gave me three more referrals, and by the end of October I had forty-six yards on the route.

I hired a boy from church to run the third machine on Saturdays.

The boots

I paid Jarrell every week that summer, the same as I always do.

But for that one week I told him the fifth day was his, all of it, every yard on the Friday list.

Nine yards at forty dollars. Three hundred and sixty dollars, the most money he had ever held in his hand at one time.

I counted it out for him on the kitchen table in twenties, and he folded it into his wallet without a word.

He did not say what he was going to do with it, and I did not ask.

Fifteen-year-old boys are entitled to their secrets, and I figured it would go to a video game, or gas money for the car he did not have yet, or a girl.

The next Saturday he came home from Wooster in the deacon’s truck.

The deacon had taken him, I found out later, and kept it to himself the whole way, which is a deacon for you.

Jarrell walked into the kitchen with a big cardboard box under his arm and set it on the table in front of me.

Then he went to the refrigerator and got a glass of milk and stood there drinking it with his back to me like nothing was going on.

I opened the box. Inside, in tissue paper, was a pair of brown leather work boots with steel toes and good thick soles, the kind I had looked at in the farm store for two summers and never bought because they cost too much.

They were my size. He had checked my old ones while I was asleep, I suppose, or in the shower.

I sat there at my kitchen table holding one in each hand, and I could not say anything at all for a long time.

“Your clogs were embarrassing,” he said finally, to the refrigerator.

“They were,” I said. My voice did not come out right.

I wear them every day on the route now. I gave Jarrell the whole fifth day’s pay, and he bought me a new pair of work boots with it.