Tom died on the ninth of April, at forty-one, in the kitchen, at about twenty past seven in the morning, of a thing in his brain that nobody knew was there.
I am going to say that once and then mostly not again, because this is not a story about that. This is a story about the grass.
He had been dead three weeks and I had not been outside. That is not a figure of speech. My sister Ro had moved into the spare room and was doing the bins and the shopping and the phone calls, and I was doing the thing you do, which is sitting in a chair in a house that has become enormous.
The lawn had gone. April in Oregon and nobody touching it — it was past ankle height and going to seed at the edges, and the dandelions had done what dandelions do, and I knew it was like that because I could see it through the front window and because on day nineteen a neighbour I do not like left a note about it.
I still have the note. It says, in full: Hi! Just a friendly reminder about the HOA guidance on lawn maintenance :)
Ro wanted to go round there. I would not let her. That is the single greatest act of restraint of my adult life and I have never been rewarded for it.
On the third of May I came downstairs and the lawn was cut.
Not tidied. Properly cut — the whole front, edged along the path and along the drive, the clippings gone rather than left in rows. Someone had done the strip by the mailbox that Tom always swore at because there’s a sprinkler head in it.
I stood at the window in a dressing gown at seven in the morning and I could not make sense of it at all. I remember thinking, with total seriousness, that Tom had done it, and then having to take that thought apart in real time, and it is the closest I have ever come to properly losing my grip.
Ro thought it was the HOA. She thought they’d sent someone and would send a bill. That was a very reasonable theory and I held it for about nine days.
Then, on the twelfth, it was cut again.
Here’s what I knew after two months, and it was not much.
It happened every nine to eleven days. Never on a schedule you could set a watch by, but never longer than eleven, all through May and June and July.
It was always morning. Or at least, always done by the time I was up, and by June I was getting up at six.
It was thorough. Front and back. He did the back through the side gate, which means he was opening a gate and walking down the side of a house belonging to a woman living alone, and I want to record that I never once found that frightening, and I have thought about why and I think it is because of the edging. Nobody edges a lawn they are not respecting.
It was silent. This is the part nobody believes. A mower is not quiet. I was sleeping badly — three, four hours, and awake at every noise the house made — and I never heard it. Not once, in three years.
And there was never anything. No note, no card, no invoice, nothing pushed through the door. The gate was always shut properly behind him. Twice he moved a recycling bin back to where it lived.
Ro and I did the obvious things. I want to be clear that we tried.
We asked the neighbours. All of them, over about a fortnight — including the note woman, who was unpleasant about it and clearly not involved. Nobody knew anything. Two of them said they’d noticed the lawn getting cut and had assumed I’d hired someone, which is what everybody assumed, all three years.
We asked the two lawn companies that work our street. Both said no, checked their books, and one of them offered me a discount, which was decent of him.
Ro left a note under a rock in the middle of the lawn. It said THANK YOU — PLEASE KNOCK. It stayed there four days and then the lawn was cut and the note was gone and the rock had been put on the porch step.
That was the first time I cried about the grass. Not the funeral, not the note from the HOA. A rock on a step.
In August I set an alarm for four in the morning.
I did it for six nights, which is not a thing I would recommend to anyone in the fourth month of grief. Four a.m., every night, and I sat in the front room in the dark in a chair by the window with a blanket and my phone and waited.
Six nights. Nothing. The lawn had been cut on the second and I sat up on the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth, and nothing happened at all.
On the fifteenth I did not set the alarm, because I had barely slept in a week and Ro had started giving me a look.
And on the morning of the fifteenth of August I came down at half past six and the lawn was cut, front and back, the gate shut, the clippings gone.
I sat down on the bottom stair and I said, out loud, to nobody, in my own empty hallway: “Oh, come on.”
And then — and this is the first thing since April that had made me do it — I laughed.