Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Two


At home, as I toasted bread and spread on raspberry jam, I tried to think of an entrepreneurial endeavor. Forget the lemonade stand. Adults only bought lemonade from kids because they felt sorry for them. The most you could make in a day was about three dollars. Forget a paper route, too. For that, you had to get up too early. Once when I was little, I had picked flowers and sold them to neighbors, but I got in trouble for that because it was the neighbors’ flowers I had picked.

Arturo said I had to find something people needed. What did people need?

I ate the first batch of toast and raspberry jam in about three seconds. Would eating too much toast make me grow taller? Probably not. I popped two more pieces of bread into the toaster.

While I waited for them to brown, I picked up the newspaper that Mom had left on the kitchen counter. The headline read, “Killer Cats on the Prowl in Oakland.”

I read the article about how some people thought mountain lions, eight foot long wild cats, had moved into the regional parks in the hills. Housing developments had crowded the mountain lions out of their habitat, so they were forced into our parks. However, a ranger was quoted as saying that no one had actually seen a mountain lion in the Oakland hills. “People get pretty hysterical,” he said, “whenever the word ‘mountain lion’ comes up. No sighting has ever been confirmed.”

The picture was scary. The mountain lion’s mouth was open, revealing four long teeth and lots of flat ones. Her tongue was pulled back, as if she were in the middle of a scream, as if she were warning, “Get back!”

The phone rang, startling me so badly I dropped the jammy knife right on the mountain lion’s nose. “Hello?” I managed to say into the receiver.

“Hi, honey. How was the last day of school? What are you doing at home? I called Aunt Lupe and she said you didn’t go home with the twins.”

“I just felt like coming here.”

“Listen, I’m gonna be late. Both of today’s clients wanted me to do huge amounts of maintenance. That just drives me crazy. Why would you pay someone a landscaper’s rates to mow lawns and pull weeds—work a kid could do? But I guess it’s their money. I can’t exactly say ‘no,’ can I? So I’ll be working until dusk, around nine o’clock. Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, still studying the picture of the mountain lion, now smeared with raspberry jam. The silence on the other end of the line let me know she wasn’t convinced. “Mom, Aunt Lupe and Uncle Ed are four blocks away. Aunt Inez is seven blocks away. I’m fine.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll be home as soon as possible. Bye, honey.”

I sighed, too, wishing my mom had more drive, more get-up-and-go. She did work hard. And she knew everything, like how to get the soil exactly right for native plants, which flowers needed lots of shade, and which kinds of shrubs were deer-resistant. But she let her clients boss her around too much. Aunt Inez said my mom had as much business sense as Mother Teresa.

Wait. There it was. Staring me right in the face. My entrepreneurial endeavor! It was so obvious I almost missed it. I dug around in my mom’s desk until I found a pad of plain white paper and big marker. At the top of a sheet I wrote:

"Mowing Edging Weeding"

I liked that! I could call my business MEW. I worked so intently on my flyer that I didn’t hear the phone ring again. I knew that it had when I heard Marita’s new girly voice on the answering machine, “Izzie. It’s me. Are you there? Pick up the phone.”

“Hey, cuz,” I said, cradling the phone on my shoulder as I wrote at the bottom of the flyer, as neatly as I could, “Call 526-8227 Ask for Isabel.”

“What are you doing?” Marita asked, then tittered.

“Nothing much,” I said, holding my flyer at arm’s length to admire it.

“Tomas is going to drive me to the mall tomorrow morning, before the barbecue. Want to come?”

“Sure,” I said, barely hearing what she had asked.

“Be here by 11:00, okay?” Marita giggled. “Bye!”

“Bye,” I said, letting the phone slide off my shoulder.

But I never did make it to the mall that summer.