“It’s a hundred degrees out here.”
“It’s character-building.”
Ariel laughed despite herself. Mrs. Higgins smiled, and for just a second, the strain around her eyes softened.
“Let me finish it,” Ariel said, moving closer. “Please. I need something to do with my hands. I just got some news and I can’t just sit in there.”
Mrs. Higgins studied her — those sharp eyes taking in the mail under Ariel’s arm, the shadows beneath her eyes, the way her free hand was pressed against her side like she was holding something together.
“Trouble?” she asked quietly.
“Nothing I can’t figure out,” Ariel said. Which was a lie, but a polite one, and Mrs. Higgins seemed to understand the difference.
She let go of the mower.
What Happened in That Yard Was Small — But It Mattered
The grass was thick and uneven. The mower was old enough to have a personality, sputtering at the corners and stalling twice on a hidden root. Ariel pushed through it, wiping her face with the hem of her shirt, her center of gravity completely rearranged by the life growing inside her.
Halfway through, she had to stop.
She leaned against the mower handle and breathed, one hand braced on her lower back, watching the heat rise off the asphalt in the street. Her vision went soft at the edges. She blinked it clear.
Mrs. Higgins appeared at her elbow with a glass of lemonade — the real kind, not the powder mix — ice clinking against the sides.
“Sit down before you fall down,” she said firmly. “You’re not going to do that baby any good if you pass out in my yard.”
They sat together on the porch steps. Mrs. Higgins didn’t ask questions right away. She just sat, and let the silence be what it was, which was something Ariel hadn’t realized she needed until it was there.
After a while, Mrs. Higgins asked how much longer she had.
“Six weeks. Give or take.”
“First one?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you scared?”
Ariel looked down at her hands. “I’m more scared of what happens after than what happens during.”
Mrs. Higgins nodded slowly. She told Ariel about Walter — her husband, gone eight years now — how he’d packed the hospital bag a full month before her due date and then repacked it twice because he kept second-guessing the snack choices. How she still reached for the phone sometimes to tell him something funny, and then remembered.
“Who’s in your corner, Ariel?” she asked finally.
The street was quiet. A sprinkler hissed somewhere down the block.
