The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

What the route was

I should tell you how I came to be standing in that yard, because none of what happened that week makes much sense unless you know what that mowing route meant to the two of us.

When my marriage ended eight years ago I was thirty-one and Jarrell was seven. I had a high school diploma, a used pickup, and one push mower.

I started cutting yards for widows at church because it was work I could do with a little boy along.

That first summer I had six yards. The second summer I had fourteen and a used thirty-six-inch rider I bought at an estate sale outside Wooster.

By the fourth summer I had a trailer, and by the sixth I had three commercial zero-turns.

Those three machines were the most expensive things I have ever owned, more than my truck. A good commercial zero-turn runs nine to fifteen thousand dollars new.

I bought two of mine used and one new, and I paid them off a month at a time.

By this June I had forty-one yards on the route, spread across Smithville, Orrville and the farm roads between them.

I cut every one of them once a week from the end of April to the middle of October.

Most were quarter-acre town lots at forty dollars a cut. A handful were bigger country places at sixty or seventy.

On a good week the route brought in about seventeen hundred dollars before gas, and that paid the mortgage on our little house.

Jarrell had mowed with me every summer since he was twelve, first on the string trimmer, then on the smaller machine.

He was careful. He walked every yard before he cut it and picked up the dog toys and the sticks without being told.

My ex-husband drives over the road for a freight outfit out of Wooster. He is not a bad man.

We married young and it did not hold, but he pays his support on time, and he calls Jarrell every Sunday from wherever he is parked that week.

Two years ago he married Kristal. She was forty-one, with a grown son named Tanner from her first marriage and a small white house with a front porch on a quiet street in Orrville.

I was polite to her. I wanted Jarrell’s other house to be a peaceful one.

Tanner was twenty. He had been let go from a feed mill in the spring and from a warehouse job the winter before.

I did not hold that against him. Plenty of boys take a while to find their feet, and I took a while to find mine.

In May, Kristal came by on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the gravel lot behind the house greasing the deck spindles on the fifty-two.

She stood at the edge of the gravel in white sandals and did not come any closer.

“I’ll get right to it,” she said. “Tanner needs something steady. You have a route that practically runs itself. I will give you five thousand dollars for your customer list, and you can keep your mowers.”

I wiped off the grease gun and set it on the tailgate.

“It doesn’t run itself, Kristal. I run it. Forty-one yards a week, and I know every one of those people by their first name. It isn’t for sale.”

“Everything is for sale,” she said. “You could start over. You did it once.”

She said it lightly, the way you would mention rain coming, and then she looked past me at my three machines lined up by the shed.

“It isn’t for sale,” I said again. She nodded slowly, like she was writing something down in her head, and she got in her car and left. I told myself that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it. Twice more in May she texted me the same offer.

The second time she added a line at the bottom. “Think about Jarrell. Families should help each other. Tanner would be good for him.”

I did not answer that one. I turned the phone face down on the kitchen table, went back outside, and changed the oil in all three machines, because work is the only thing I know to do with my hands when I am that angry.