Dorothea
When we got home, Dorothea Kurtz was waiting on my back step with her cane across her knees.
She is seventy-seven and lives in the house next to mine, and she has been on my route since the very first summer.
She had a dish towel folded in her lap, and she was turning it over and over in her hands, which is a thing she does when she has something to say that she does not want to say.
“Your truck went out of here this morning with all three machines on the trailer,” she said. “Something’s wrong with them, isn’t it?”
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“Somebody poured sand in the gas tanks,” I said. “All three.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. “Saturday afternoon,” she said.
“While you were at Jarrell’s ball game in Rittman. I saw her, Cami. I saw her in your gravel lot from my kitchen window.”
I sat down next to her on the step. “Who did you see?”
“Your ex-husband’s wife. The blond one. She had a coffee can and a funnel, and she went from one mower to the next. I thought she was filling them up with gas for you. I thought, well, she’s family, she’s being helpful.”
She pressed the towel against her mouth. “I should have come over and asked her. I should have walked right over there with my cane and asked her what she was doing. I’m so sorry, honey.”
“You didn’t know,” I said, and I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were thin as a bird’s under her housedress.
“Nobody would think a grown woman would do such a thing. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
We sat there a while. A mourning dove was going somewhere down the fence line. Then Dorothea wiped her face, put her cane down firmly on the step, and got herself up.
“My husband’s mower is in my garage,” she said. “The red one. He bought it the summer before he passed, and it’s been run maybe ten times. The blade’s sharp. He sharpened everything. You take it.”
Jarrell went over and rolled it out of her garage.
It was a red twenty-one-inch push mower with a rear bag, clean as the day it came off the store floor, and it started on the second pull.
I called the deacon at our church, a retired dairyman who still cuts his own two acres with a push mower out of pure stubbornness.
Within the hour he drove over with a black self-propelled mower in the back of his truck and a can of fresh gas.
“Blade’s new this spring,” he said, lifting it down. “Bring it back when you’re done with it. Don’t hurry.”
He looked at me for a second like he wanted to ask, and then he decided not to, and I was grateful.