The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

“It’s true,” I said. I did not say anything else. I did not need to.

“Then I want to be on your list,” she said.

“Every Friday. I don’t care what it costs. My husband’s knees are done, and the boy who cut it last summer never showed up half the time.”

She wrote me a check for the first cut right there on the hood of my truck.

While she was writing it, the retired man from the house on the other side came down his own driveway in his slippers and asked if I had room for one more.

I said I would make room.

All that time, Kristal stood on her step with her arms folded and watched her two next-door neighbors sign up with the woman whose mowers she had poured sand into.

I did not look at her. I wrote their names in my notebook.

When I finally did look up, she had gone back inside, and the screen door was swinging shut behind her.

The porch was empty, and the maple shade had moved halfway across her yard.

Jarrell tied off the last trailer strap and pulled on it twice to check it, the way I taught him.

Then he climbed in the passenger side and set the cooler between his feet.

“Forty-one,” he said.

“Forty-one,” I said.

He looked out the windshield for a second. “Forty-three now, I guess.”

Saturday and after

My ex-husband came home Saturday afternoon. I heard about it from Jarrell, not from either of them.

He did not raise his voice in that white house, Jarrell said. He did not have to.

On Sunday after church he drove over to my place in his own truck, by himself.

He stood by my shed in his church shirt for a while, looking at the empty spots on the gravel where the three mowers usually sit.

“She’s going to pay you back,” he said. “Every dollar of Burl’s bill. Out of her own money, not mine. I told her that if she didn’t, I’d take it to the bridge club myself and let them sort her out.”

I almost smiled at that. “The bridge club already paid it.”

“Then she’ll pay you, and you’ll have a little cushion for once.” He looked at the ground.

“I should have seen what she was getting at in May. I knew she wanted that route for Tanner. I just never thought she’d do this.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “That’s why it worked.”

He shook my hand when he left. We have not shaken hands since the day we signed our divorce papers.

It was a good handshake, a decent man’s handshake, and I was glad to have it.

Burl called Monday morning at seven. All three machines were done, the tanks flushed clean, both carburetors rebuilt, and the third one checked over and running smooth.

He had changed the fuel filters again for free, just to be sure.

When I went to pick them up, he had a new locking gas cap sitting on the seat of each one.

“On the house,” he said. “Don’t argue. My sister would never let me hear the end of it.”

Two weeks after that, on a Saturday morning, Kristal came to my back door. She did not stand at the edge of the gravel this time.