The mower was in the corner. A red Snapper push mower, maybe twenty years old. Grandpa bought it new at the Western Auto in Rolla, back when there was still a Western Auto in Rolla. He babied that mower like it was a classic car.
I pulled it out into the light.
It looked terrible.
The deck was caked with old grass, green and black and stinking. The air filter was so packed with dirt it was the color of a mud puddle. When I pulled the dipstick, the oil came out thick and black as tar, and there was barely enough of it to wet the end.
I tipped the mower up on its side and looked at the blade.
It was dull as a butter knife. I ran my thumb along the edge and it didn’t even catch. There were dings in it from rocks, and one end was bent down a little, so the whole thing would wobble when it spun.
No wonder the yard smelled like that. A dull blade doesn’t cut grass. It rips it. Tears the tops off and leaves them ragged and brown, so the whole lawn looks sick a day later.
He’d never once changed the oil. Not once in eleven months. Probably not ever.
Four hundred dollars a month.
I got to work.
I pulled the spark plug wire first, because Grandpa taught me that when I was eleven and would come back from the grave to whip me if I forgot. I took the blade off with a socket wrench from the pegboard. Then I clamped it in Grandpa’s bench vise and went at it with his big flat file, long even strokes, the way he showed me, until the edge shone silver and would shave the hair off my arm.
I hung it on a nail to check the balance. One end dipped. I filed the heavy side down until it hung level.
I scraped the deck clean with a putty knife. I knocked the dirt out of the air filter against the shed wall. I drained the old oil into a coffee can and filled it back up with fresh oil from a jug I found on the top shelf. Grandpa’s jug. Bought in 2009, according to the faded price sticker. Still good. Oil doesn’t go bad if you keep the cap on.
By the time I was done, I was sweating through my tan shirt, and it was only eight-fifteen.
When I rolled the mower out of the shed, Grandma was on the porch.
She’d dragged her old aluminum lawn chair out from beside the back door. The one with the green and white plastic webbing that was half broken on one side. She’d set it right at the top of the porch steps, facing the yard.
She was sitting in it in her blue housecoat. Her hands were folded in her lap.
She didn’t say anything. She just watched me.
She watched me the way she did when I was eleven.
It was the summer after my dad died. My mother had gone to Kansas City. I was living in the back bedroom that used to be my dad’s, with his high school football trophies still on the shelf.
