The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

Friday

I had thought about moving those three. I had gone back and forth at the kitchen table Thursday at supper with my notebook open beside my plate.

In the end I left them where they had always been, because they were Friday yards, and they had always been Friday yards.

One of them was the house directly across the street from Kristal’s, a gray-sided place where a retired couple had been on my route for four years.

Kristal had moved into the white house across from them two years ago. I had mowed that yard every Friday since, with Kristal watching or not.

We did the first six yards of Friday by two in the afternoon. My hands had gone past blistering into something hard and numb.

Jarrell had sunburn on the back of his neck in the exact shape of his white T-shirt collar. I was in a gray tank top and khaki shorts, with my hair in a messy bun that had given up hours ago.

The first of the three on Kristal’s street was at the end of the block. The second was in the middle.

By the time we got to the third, the one across from her house, it was coming up on five o’clock and the sun had gone long and gold through the maple trees.

Jarrell took the back with the black mower like always. I could hear it humming behind the house.

Then he came around front, done, and started working the curb with the rake while I made my last passes across the front yard with the red one.

I was on my third stripe when the front door of the small white house across the street opened.

Kristal came out onto the step in a pink top, with her dyed blond hair pulled back, and she folded her arms and stood there.

I did not look up at her for a long time.

I finished the third stripe and turned the mower and started a fourth, going slow so the line would come out straight. Dorothea’s husband would have wanted it straight, and so did I.

When the front was done, I shut off the red mower, pulled the bag, and carried it to the curb where Jarrell was raking.

I shook the clippings into a lawn bag and twisted the top and tied it, the last bag of the forty-one yards.

Then I straightened up and looked across the street at her.

She was still on the step with her arms folded. She looked tired, I thought, and older than forty-one.

Her mouth opened and closed once, and I waited to see if she would come down the steps.

“You made your point,” she finally called across. Her voice was not loud. The street was so quiet you could hear the sprinkler going two houses down.

“I didn’t come to make a point,” I said. “It’s Friday, and this is a Friday yard. I’ve cut it every Friday for four years.”

She did not have anything to say to that. I picked up the bag and set it at the curb with the others, and Jarrell leaned the rake against the trailer.

That was when the screen door banged on the house next to Kristal’s, the one with the flower boxes.

A woman about my mother’s age came down her porch steps and walked straight across the street toward us, right past the bottom of Kristal’s step.

She had a checkbook in her hand. She did not look at Kristal at all. She looked at me.

“I’m Bonita,” she said. “I’ve been watching that boy of yours push that mower around the back of this house all afternoon from my kitchen. Is it true what they’re saying at church? About the sand?”