“So, before we get started on your Christmas decorations, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind us mowing your lawn for you?” Junior asks, still smiling.
“Oh, honey, you don’t need to go and do all that. My son’ll be here in a couple of weeks to take care of it.”
“Yeah, but we’re here, and we don’t mind.”
Junior pairs his gentle insistence with his brilliant smile, and I swear the old lady blushes.
“Well, if you don’t mind, honey. The gas tank’s out in the garage as well.”
“Thank you, Miss Lucille. We’ll get that taken care of for you right away. You wouldn’t happen to have a trimmer out there too, would you?”
She nods, leading us over to the garage. “It’s just an old electric trimmer, but it works.”
“You wanna trim while I mow?” he asks, turning to me.
“Uh, sure,” I answer, wondering if now’s a good time to admit that those things scare the hell out of me, so I always make my uncle do that part of the yard work.
“Sounds like a plan.”
Miss Lucille slowly makes her way outside. Junior digs around in the back of the garage until he comes up with an ancient-looking trimmer in one hand and a massively tangled orange extension cord in the other.
My stomach drops.
It’s okay to not know how to do something. This is as good a time as any to learn.
Junior pushes them into my hands and gets started on prepping the mower.
I sit down on the concrete and bite my lip, trying to figure out where to begin untangling the snarls. I find one end, and a few minutes later, loop the cord around my elbow and plug everything in.
See? This isn’t so bad.
Junior’s already started, knocking out the perimeter first, so I go in behind him. I’m glad to find it’s not as dangerous as I thought, but itisfrustratingly slow. About every two feet, I have to stop, turn the damn thing over, and pull out the trimmer line. I always see guys weed-whacking with these big, sweeping motions, but that’s not what’s happening. Worse, it’s fucking with my manicure.
Right around the fifteenth time I’ve had to pull apart the assembly and yank out the line, the mower stops, and Junior looms over me.
“Hey, Tanner?”
“Yeah?” I ask, wiping sweat off my brow while I let my greedy eyes take their fill of tall, stacked, and handsome.
“Can I show you something real quick?”
“Uh, sure,” I say, wondering if he’s about to kiss me in the middle of Miss L’s yard.
He takes the trimmer from my hands and reassembles it.
Okay, so…no kissing. Got it.
Wow, am I dumb.
“When you’re trimming,” he says, starting up the thing. “You don’t need to manually pull out the line. These things have what’s called a bump feed—you just bump the trimmer against the grass like this—”
He bumps the casing, stops the trimmer, and shows me the extended line.
“Oh. I didn’t know it did that.”
Yep. Dumb as a box of rocks.
He rubs my shoulder. “No worries. Also, um…be careful about the placement of the electrical cord. You keep pulling it into my path. Makes me wonder if you’re not trying to electrocute me.”
