The Mower Nobody Thought She Built

Dennis turned the belt guard over in his hands the way you would turn over a dead mouse you found in a coffee can. He did not look at the mower. He looked at the guard, and then at the sky over the grandstand, and then at the clipboard on the card table.

“Can’t pass this one,” he said.

My daughter was standing right in front of him in a white helmet with the visor pushed up. Reese was fifteen years old that August. She wore a gray long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists, jeans, and work boots she had broken in on our gravel drive.

It was the first Thursday of the Trent County Fair, six o’clock in the evening, and the heat was just starting to lift off the grass. The air smelled like fried dough, hot diesel and the hog barn. Behind us the line of lawnmowers stretched back past the sno-cone stand.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

Dennis still did not look at me. He had been my husband’s older brother for twenty-three years, and in that whole time he had looked at me directly maybe a dozen times. He looked at Reese.

“Rebuilt engine,” he said. “That makes it a modified engine. Modified goes in the Open class.”

“Open class is eighteen and over,” Reese said. She said it carefully, like she was reading it off a card.

“That’s right.”

“She’s fifteen, Dennis,” I said.

“I know how old she is, Dena.”

At Trent County it runs on the Thursday of fair week, on a dirt oval behind the grandstand about the size of a baseball infield. Hay bales line the track. The stock class is the one for ordinary riding mowers, the kind your uncle cut the lawn with, with the blade taken off and a kill switch bolted on.

Dennis Ostlund had been the race superintendent for eleven years. He had a clipboard, a blue polo shirt with the fair board’s name stitched on it, and a way of putting his thumb on the edge of the table when he was about to rule on something.

He had his thumb on the table now.

Reese did not say anything. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans and pulled out the rulebook, which was a booklet of twelve stapled pages with colored tabs sticking out of the side like a church hymnal at a Christmas service. She had tabbed it herself. She turned to page four.

“It says here a stock mower has a factory-pattern engine, factory carburetor, no blade, and a working kill switch,” she said. “It doesn’t say anything about rebuilt.”

“It’s a committee interpretation.”

“Which committee?”

“The race committee.”

“Who’s on the race committee?”

A couple of the boys in line behind us snickered, and Dennis’s neck went red. It was not a hot red. It was the cold kind that comes up when a man finds out someone younger can read.

“Reese,” he said, in the voice you use on a dog that is about to get on the couch. “I’m going to be straight with you, hon. Girls don’t wrench. Somebody’s dad built this, and that’s fine, but it goes in Open, and Open is for adults who built their own.”

I saw eleven kids on lawnmowers behind us go quiet. Some of them were girls, a couple of twelve-year-olds sitting in their dads’ pickups with their cut-off shorts and braids, and they were looking at Reese the way you look at a person standing on a ledge.