The New Neighbor Mowed My Lawn the Week My Divorce Went Through novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lawn
The morning her decree arrives, the new neighbor mows her lawn and will not take pay; that night she leaves her lamp on and his blinds rise one inch.
The email from my attorney came in at 9:14 on Thursday morning, and the subject line said "Decree Entered."
I read it standing at the kitchen counter in my bathrobe, holding a piece of toast.
The attachment was fourteen pages.
I skipped to the last one and found the judge's signature and a date.
May 14.
I had been married to Greg Brodbeck for eleven years, and it ended on a Thursday between a coffee and a dentist reminder.
I waited to feel something large.
What I felt was hungry, so I finished the toast.
Then, at 9:40 by the microwave clock, I heard an engine start in my garage.
It was a small, rough, familiar sound, and I had not heard it in over a year.
Greg's red Toro mower had sat in the corner by the workbench since last summer, and I had never once pulled its cord.
I went to the front door with the crust still in my hand.
I had put the garage door up that morning to roll out the recycling, and I had forgotten to put it down.
The mower was gone from its corner.
Out on my front lawn, a man was pushing it in a straight line through grass that had reached my shins.
He was young, and he had no shirt on.
His gray T-shirt hung out of his back pocket, and he was wearing work jeans and boots with sawdust in the laces.
The new neighbor.
He had moved into the rental at number 16 in March.
In two months I had said exactly one thing to him, which was "Hi."
He reached the edge of the walk, turned the mower, and started a second stripe beside the first.
Nine inches of grass went down behind him in a clean green line.
I stood on my own porch in my robe and watched his back.
It was brown from the sun and long and lean, and it moved when he leaned into the handle.
He saw me on the turn, cut the engine, and straightened up.
"Morning, ma'am," he said. "I hope that's all right. The door was open, and it was getting kind of high."
"Ma'am," I said.
"Mrs. Brodbeck." He wiped his forehead with his wrist. "Sorry. I'll finish and put it back."
His front tooth was chipped at the corner, and there was a pale shiny scar on his forearm, an old burn.
He was looking at my face, not at the robe.
I noticed that, because it was a thing I had stopped expecting from anyone.
"Hang on," I said.
I went inside, filled the biggest glass I owned with ice water, and came back out.
I held it out across the porch rail.
He took it with his right hand, and his fingers closed over mine on the glass.
They stayed there.
His palm was hot and rough, and I felt every callus.
Neither of us moved for longer than a glass of water takes to change hands.
"Thank you," he said, and drank it all without stopping, with his throat working.
A drop ran down his chin and onto his chest, and I watched it go all the way to his belt.
I am thirty-seven years old, and I watched it shamelessly.
"What do I owe you?" I said.
"Nothing."
"It's an hour of work, and that grass was a hay field."
"It's a Thursday," he said. "I'm off."
I went in, got a twenty from my purse, and came back.
He looked at the bill, and then at me, and he shook his head.
"I'd feel weird," he said.
"Then I'll feel weird. That's two of us."
"Lena," I said. "Mrs. Brodbeck stopped being on the paperwork at nine fourteen."
He laughed, and it changed his whole face.
"Tyler," he said. "From next door."
"I know where you're from."
He finished the front and the back and edged the walk.
I sat on the top step the whole time with a second coffee and did not even pretend to read my phone.
When he rolled the Toro back into the garage, I wrote my number on a yellow sticky note and pressed it onto the handle.
He saw me do it and said nothing.
He picked it up, folded it once, and put it in his shirt pocket.
Then he walked home across the grass he had cut, pulling the gray T-shirt over his head.
I stayed on the step until he had gone inside.
All afternoon I did my billing from the dining room table, and I got nothing done.
My bedroom is the master, on the second floor, at the side of the house.
I had not slept in it since January, when Greg left, and I used the guest room.
But its window faces Tyler's upstairs window across forty feet of side yard, and I had stood in that doorway many nights.
His blinds had been shut every single night since the twenty-first of March.
I knew the date because I had watched the moving van from this same room.
I told myself it meant nothing.
Eleven years with Greg, and in all of them he had never once looked at me.
Not across a room, not in the shower, not in the light.
He turned the lamp off before he came to bed, and he faced the wall.
At dusk I went upstairs, into the room I had been avoiding, and I turned on the lamp by the bed.
I did not close the curtains.
I stood in the light with the window bare and the whole yard dark outside, and I unbuttoned my blouse.
I took it off, and then my bra, and I dropped them on the carpet.
I stood there topless in my own lit window, and my hands would not stop shaking.
Across the side yard, the blinds on the second floor were closed, as always.
I unzipped my skirt and let it fall.
I thought, This is the stupidest thing you have ever done, Lena.
I thought, Keep going.
Then, over there in the dark, one of the slats lifted about an inch.
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