It went on for three years.
I want to put the whole span down before I go back into it, because the length is the thing that makes it what it is. Anyone can do a kind thing once. This was approximately a hundred and ten times.
Year one: every nine to eleven days, March through October. Nothing in winter, which makes sense, and which I did not find out until the following March, and which meant I spent a whole winter believing it had stopped.
The first March back was the fourteenth. I came down and it was cut and I had to sit on the stairs again.
Year two: the same, except twice he did something extra. In June he cut back the laurel by the drive that had been growing across the path since before Tom died and that I had been walking sideways past for fourteen months. In September he raked the leaves.
Year three: the same, until August, and then the thing in chapter four.
I stopped trying to catch him at the end of the first summer.
Partly because it was making me unwell — you cannot sit up at four in the morning in the fifth month after your husband dies and expect that to go well — and partly because of something Ro said, which annoyed me at the time and which was right.
She said: “He’s clearly going to a lot of trouble not to be caught. Have you thought about why?”
And I said, defensively, that I wanted to thank him.
And Ro said, “Yeah. That’s why.”
That reframed the whole thing and it took me weeks to accept it.
Because she was right, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. Everything about how it was done was a system for avoiding the moment where I say thank you.
The timing was irregular so I couldn’t predict it. It was early enough that I wouldn’t be up. It was silent — which I still don’t understand and which turned out to have an explanation. There was never a note, never a name, never a request for anything.
And when Ro left a note asking him to knock, he did not knock. He moved the rock and carried on.
That is not shyness. Shyness is not that consistent. That is somebody who has decided, as a matter of policy, that this is going to be a thing that happens to me and not a thing that happens between us, and who has stuck to that for three years across roughly a hundred and ten visits.
I found that infuriating for about six months. Then I found it unbearable. And then somewhere in the second year it turned into the only thing in my life that I found reliably comforting, and I want to try to explain that, because it is the actual subject of all this.
Everybody stops.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. For about five weeks after Tom died there were so many people in my house that I hid in the bathroom to get a break, and there was a lasagne situation that Ro and I still refer to as “the lasagne situation,” and the phone went constantly.
And then it stops. Not because anyone is bad. Because people have jobs and children and their own things, and because five weeks is genuinely a long time to hold somebody up, and because at some point everyone has to go back to their life and you are the only person who cannot.
Month four is much worse than month one and there is nobody there for month four. Month eleven is worse than month four. The second anniversary is worse than the first, which nobody warns you about.
And every nine to eleven days, through all of it, somebody I had never met came to my house before it was light and cut my grass and left without being thanked.
There is a version of this where that’s sweet. It isn’t sweet. It was structural. It was the only thing in three years that did not stop, and I organised more of myself around it than I would like to admit.
I kept a record, because I am who I am. Ro found the spreadsheet in year two and looked at me with real concern and I said, “It’s how I’m coping,” and she said, “Dana, this has a chart.”
It did have a chart. It had a chart because I had worked out something in the middle of the first summer that I could not explain, and that turned out — much later — to be the single most important fact in this entire story.
He never came within four days of a Thursday.
Not never on a Thursday. That would be simple. He never came on Thursday, or on the Wednesday before, or the Friday after, and once you allow for that, the nine-to- eleven-day rhythm stops looking irregular and starts looking like a man fitting something into a very tight schedule around a fixed obstacle.
Something happened on Thursdays. For three years.
I had no idea what, and I had no way to find out, and in the middle of the second winter I finally did the thing I had been avoiding since May of the first year.
I bought a camera.