A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [64]
Bridget offered helpfully, “How much do you charge?”
He spat. “Ten dollars.”
Bridget relaxed, smiling broadly. “Farley sent you! See, girls?” She spread her hands; problem solved. “Farley sent him!”
“An hour,” said the boy. His eyes, like his voice, were cold and flat.
Their smiles faded.
They looked from one to the other for a moment, visibly weighing their options. Bridget said, in a rather small voice, “Well, I suppose . . .”
But Lindsay held up a staying hand, her jaw set. She stepped toward the boy. “How old are you?”
He didn’t reply immediately. Then, without flinching, “Eighteen.”
Lindsay cast a look back over her shoulder to Bridget and Cici. If he was a day over fifteen they all would have been hugely surprised.
She said, “Have you got a high school diploma?”
He answered sullenly, “Don’t need one.”
“No,” she agreed, “I don’t suppose you do. Unless you want to make ten dollars an hour.”
He scowled at her, and she advanced on him.
“Do you know who makes ten dollars an hour in this county?” she demanded. “Medical transcriptionists, legal assistants, kindergarten teachers. People with high school diplomas and a certificate or degree. Library assistants, firefighters, EMTs—they make ten dollars an hour. And do you know why? Because they went to school, they worked hard, they studied, and they did not lie about their ages. Do you know what lawn maintenance people make?”
The anger in his eyes was almost overcome by curiosity. Perhaps he had never thought of himself as being in the “lawn maintenance” business before. “What?” he finally demanded, reluctantly.
“Six dollars an hour,” she replied, and he spat on the ground in disgust. “That’s well above minimum wage.”
His lip curled in a sneer. “I ain’t working for minimum wage.”
“Or you could try that burger joint out on the highway. I understand they’re paying six twenty-five an hour.”
His scowl was fierce as he took another drag on the cigarette. “Ain’t got no car.”
She shrugged.
“Eight fifty.”
“Six.”
“Eight dollars.”
“You got it,” she told him, and he looked smug until she added, “the minute you show me a high school diploma.”
His scowl was fierce. She didn’t flinch.
“How many hours?” he asked at last.
“As many as you can work.”
He tossed the butt of the cigarette away and left it smoldering in the grass.
She said, “Well, you think about it.”
She turned and walked back toward the house, her fingers crossed in her pockets. She was almost to the porch before she heard the lawn mower start up again, and her face broke into a wide, self-congratulatory grin. “We’ve got ourselves a yard boy!” she exclaimed happily.
Cici gave a wry shake of her head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
And Bridget added uneasily, “I don’t know. He seems a little scary.”
“Not as scary as that crazy dog,” Lindsay pointed out, and Bridget had to agree.
Cici shaded her eyes, watching the lawn mower make a careful circuit around the overgrown flower bed. “Assuming he doesn’t just drive the mower on down the highway to that Burger Shack job,” she said, “it would be great if he could weed the flower beds and burn some of this brush.”
“Not to mention the boxwoods,” Bridget added, indicating the nine foot high shrubs that flanked the front porch.
“And when he’s finished with that . . .”
“I think this is going to work out just fine,” Lindsay decided smugly. And then she exclaimed, “Oh!” as she suddenly remembered. She whirled and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Watch out for the yellow jackets!” she shouted.
By the end of the day, the boy called Noah had mowed the entire front lawn and emptied eight bags of soggy clippings into the compost pile. At dusk, he solved the problem of the yellow jackets by the time-proven method of pouring gasoline into their ground nest and tossing a match in after it—a process to which the horrified women would have immediately and strenuously objected had they known about it before the fact. Lindsay paid him in cash for hours worked,