He still comes.
We negotiated it, on the porch, that first Saturday, and the negotiation took about twenty minutes and I lost most of it.
I wanted to pay him. Absolutely not, and he was so immovable on this that I dropped it inside four minutes.
I wanted to at least be up and out there and say hello. He said, “You could.” And then, after a pause: “But you don’t have to.”
And I understood what he was offering and I took it, because he was right and I was not ready, and because a man who has thought this carefully about how to help somebody without costing them anything had clearly thought about that part too.
So the arrangement is: he comes. I know now. I am usually awake and I usually watch from the upstairs window, and about half the time he glances up and about half the time he doesn’t, and neither of us waves, and that is exactly right and I cannot explain why to anybody who hasn’t been in month eleven.
Roughly once a month he comes in for tea afterwards and does not drink it. Those mornings I go down.
The grandson is fifteen now. His name is Mateo and he is enormous and monosyllabic and he has come twice, and the second time he did the edging without being asked, badly, and Hector let him, and said nothing, and I thought about Tom the whole time.
Hector retired in the spring. Nineteen years and then twenty-two, and there was a thing at the depot with a cake, and Priti sent me a photograph of it.
He kept the mower. There is a whole story about the mower that I will not go into except to say that Danny and Priti and about six people from the depot were involved and that it was extremely funny and that Hector cried, which he has done twice in my presence and both times about equipment.
I have started doing the thing.
Not lawns — I am not going to pretend I have become someone who mows for strangers at five in the morning. I have a job and a bad back and no Kessler.
But there is a woman four streets over whose husband died in February, and I have not knocked on her door, and I have not sent a card with my phone number in it saying let me know if you need anything, which is the sentence everybody says and which puts the entire job on the person who is least able to do it.
What I do instead is her bins. Every Tuesday night, and back in on Wednesday morning, since March.
She has not worked out who it is. I know she hasn’t, because in June she asked me at the postbox whether the council had changed something, and I said I didn’t know, and I have never lied so cheerfully in my life.
Ro thinks this is hilarious and slightly deranged and has pointed out that I am recreating the exact thing that took me three years and a spreadsheet to solve. She is right. I have thought about it and I do not care.
Because here is what I actually took from three years of this, and it is the only advice in it.
When somebody’s person dies, everybody says let me know if you need anything. It is meant completely sincerely and it is worth nothing, because it hands the work to the one person in the situation who cannot pick anything up. I did not have the capacity in month four to identify a need, formulate a request, contact a specific person, and receive help gracefully. I did not have the capacity to open a box on top of a wardrobe. I certainly did not have the capacity to ring somebody and say “actually, could you do my lawn.”
So: don’t ask. Look at the house and find the thing that is visibly not being done, and go and do that thing, and do not require anything back — not thanks, not a conversation, not a face.
And then keep doing it in month four, and month eleven, and in the second year when everyone else has stopped. That is the whole of it. The kindness is not the mowing. The kindness is the ninth to eleventh day, a hundred and ten times.
One last thing.
I asked Hector once, later, in the kitchen, whether he’d ever thought about stopping. Early on, before he knew me. Whether there was a point where he thought right, that’s enough, she’s back on her feet.
He said yes. He said in the second September he’d more or less decided it was time — the leaves were coming, I was clearly functioning, he’d done a year and a half.
I said what changed.
And Hector said, “The curtains.”
He said that all through that autumn the upstairs curtains were still open at five in the morning, every single time.
He said, “So I thought, no. Not yet.”
They’re shut now. Have been since about the middle of last year. I sleep from about eleven to six most nights, which two years ago I would not have believed, and I did not do anything to achieve it and I could not tell you what did.
He noticed before I did. He never said. He just kept coming until it stopped being necessary, and then kept coming anyway, because by then it was Tuesday tea and a fifteen-year-old doing bad edging and whatever the four of us are now.
The grass is fine. It has been fine for a long time.