Chapter 10
Ten
The front yard is one good rain away from a jungle, and the seed-spitting neighbor seems to enjoy it.
Despite his long days—he gets home just before dark every night with a little girl in tow—I’ve seen him every day for the last two weeks.
Two. Weeks.
Getting his mail, going to and from his rusted old truck with bags of groceries, or simply watching me bumble through my boredom. With a smile on his face.
If he sees me with Mom, he rushes over to talk to her, his bright dancing eyes taunting me as he does.
And no matter what either of us are doing or how busy he is, he always stops to look at the yard and loudly whistle a note that translates to getting long, then smiles a shape that translates to bet you wish you would have let me fix that.
After a week, he ramped up his whistle to bring his bad jokes into the mix.
“Did you see the lawn sign at the rehab center?” he shouted from his driveway.
I was dragging a hose around to water Mom’s roses, pretending the grass wasn’t so tall it was making my legs itch.
“Can’t say that I did,” I hollered without looking at him.
“It said stay off the grass.”
I rolled my eyes, praying he’d take a hint.
“Get it?” he shouted, not taking a hint. “Grass?”
I gave him a long look as he held an imaginary joint at his mouth. Then I shut the hose off and went inside.
But this morning as I drank coffee and looked out the kitchen window, I knew there was no more ignoring the situation. It’s the first of September, but it still feels like summer. If I don’t take care of the grass, it’ll overtake the house and trap me in here forever like a doomed game of Jumanji.
After making Mom breakfast but before letting her rest on the couch, I force her through a simple sudoku puzzle for brain function optimization—she bitches the whole time—then make her walk to the end of the driveway and back.
The manual mower that haunted my youth is still in the shed. It’s rusted, it’s heavy, and from hours of using this thing when I was a kid, it doesn’t have a prayer of doing what I need it to. I push it a few feet and the grass simply flattens.
“Damn,” I mutter.
Because the universe is in on the plot to make these three months as annoying as possible, the neighbor—what’s his name again?—appears.
“Need help?” he hollers from next to his truck.
He’s in what I’m learning to be his life uniform: worn jeans, fitted white T-shirt—clean in the morning and grass stained and sweaty by the evening—and, of course, boots. I’m wearing cutoffs, a tank top, and a pair of tennis shoes. Our eyes meet and the knowing sparkle in his turns me irrational.
I wordlessly march inside and kick my shoes off.
Mom appears—she’s wearing tap shoes.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
I glare at her, balancing on one foot as I adjust the heel of the nude Sam Edelman pump on the other.
If they’re good enough for Bryce Dallas Howard’s character to run from dinosaurs in one of the Jurassic Park movies for over an hour—I bought them immediately once the saleswoman told me that fun fact—I can sure as hell mow the yard in them.
Also, they’re the least expensive shoes I own.
If they get destroyed, it’ll be worth it.
“Proving a point to your idiotic neighbor.”
“Gavin?” she asks, amused.
“The one and only,” I snip. “And why are you wearing tap shoes?”
“Tapsersizing.” She taps a loud toe against the hardwood floor. “My body needs to move with whimsy.”
I direct a frustrated snarl at her but march outside anyway—I’ll deal with her tapsersizing and whimsy later.
I don’t care if the shoes are impractical.
I don’t care if I’m the most ridiculous woman to ever mow a yard.
What I do care about is this man taking a hint and leaving me alone and my legs looking like a million bucks as he does.
He’s waiting by his truck when I return. I flick him a wave, square up to the mower, and shout, “Got it.”
Swallowing my grunt, I push. The mower makes it less than a foot before clogging with wet grass. It won’t budge, meaning it certainly won’t cut. Sonofabitch.
Without invitation, Gavin jogs over, unclogs the blade, and gives it a smooth push. He grins. “Nice shoes.”
I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth until my urge to scream subsides. “Thank you.”
He rests his forearms on the handle of the mower, lips twitching. “For what?”
“For noticing my shoes, smart-ass.” Perfectly timed, said shoes sink into the wet grass.
The front door of his house opens, and a young girl emerges with a backpack. She’s too far away for me to make out any of her features—I have no idea how old she is—but he waves and shouts, “Be there in just a minute, Ads.”
She gets in the truck, and he looks back to me. “I can give your mom noise-cancelling headphones for the half hour it would take for me to cut the grass, you know?” His gaze travels down my body—slowly—then lingers on my shoes. “Though this is fun to watch.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I doubt you need anything,” he says easily. “But I’m offering.”
Maybe I’m suspicious by nature or maybe I’ve been in the city too long, but I ask, “Why?”
“Grass is dangerous,” he says, wetting his lips. He leans in closer to whisper, “Full of blades.”
I snort. “That’s atrocious.”
“Maybe.” He pokes his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “Worked though.”
“To?”
“Make you laugh.”
Those three words jolt me with awareness.
I can handle bullshit with ease. I can take an insult and turn it into ammunition.
But his full attention is jarring. His persistence is .
. . I don’t know what this is. He keeps looking at me and smiling.
Pushing the mower back and forth so the blade squeaks.
I want him to leave, but if anything, he settles into the yard like it’s his favorite seat in the house.
“Is this your way of flirting with me?”
He bites back a smile. “Guess not if you have to ask.”
“Okay.”
“Okay I can flirt with you?”
I laugh, a genuine sound that’s almost unfamiliar in my ears. “No.” I rake my gaze over him. “You’re, like, twelve. Pretty sure that’s illegal.”
“Thirty, actually.” His brows raise like that changes a damn thing. “And extremely mow-tivated.” He pushes the mower to help the sad state of his puns.
“Still bad.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “Noted.”
The horn of his truck beeps, and the girl—presumably his kid—waves impatiently through the passenger window. There’s no ring on his finger. Probably got married too young and that went the way it always does.
He says, “I gotta go.”
“Right.” Part of me is disappointed. His jokes are bad, he’s so rough around the edges his looks could break skin, but he’s someone to talk to. A little intriguing. Someone who’s never interacted with the human race might call him funny. “Thanks for your help.”
He looks at the mower like he knows how bad the job is. “You wanna go out with me?”
I guffaw. “What?”
“We should go out,” he repeats, cool and confident. Like I’m not a decade older or in a different income bracket than he is. “On a date.”
“A date?” I echo.
He smiles. “A date.”
I don’t know him.
He’s thirty.
I don’t live here.
He looks like a ranch hand and spits and drives the definition of a beater.
But mostly, I don’t know the last time I’ve been asked on a date.
The men I meet are the ones who sit on vacant barstools next to mine at an absurd hour after a long day at the office.
They buy me a drink. Things progress the way things progress after top-shelf liquor and surface-level conversations.
Ties get loosened, looks get heated, a cab gets shared.
But a date? It’s so . . . intimate. Intimate in a way I don’t have time for.
Also, boredom must be driving me mad, because I kind of want to say yes.
“What kind of date would you take me on?” There’s no way this guy has any money, he might as well stamp it on his forehead.
It’s not even that I care about money—I make enough I could marry a hobo and we could ride off into the sunset—but I do care about how motivated someone is, and based on his grass-stained shirts and shabby looks, he isn’t.
“What kind of date do you like to go on?”
No way in hell I’m admitting that I don’t know.
“How much money do you make?”
If I’m hoping this deters him, it does anything but. He laughs, loud and like the sound of true joy. “Seventeen an hour.” He pauses for me to compute. It’s a low number; computing doesn’t take long. Also, I haven’t been paid hourly since college. “You?”
“Same.” He knows damn well I’m lying. “Give or take.”
His eyes dance as if we are. Despite the frayed edges of his old hat, too-long hair, and patchy beard, his blue eyes are bright, clear, and bottomless.
“It’s settled then,” he says. “Money isn’t an issue—because we make the same amount—so you’ll let me take you out.”
The beep of a horn cuts through the air, making us turn to his truck. The girl waves again, and Gavin holds up a finger.
“You should take out someone your own age,” I tell him, my ankles wobbling as I pry his hands from the mower.
“And I have work to do. And my mother is already doing God knows what without me watching.” I make the mistake of glancing toward the house and see my mother’s face in the kitchen window—smiling.
Gavin lifts a hand to wave; she does the same.
“No time for dates with thirty-year-old little boys who spend their time cutting grass.” I give him a smug look.
“But if you have an older brother who knows how to tell a joke and use a razor, feel free to send him my way.”
“Hm.” His open expression falters, just briefly, then he eyes the mower. “Have I mentioned I’m mow-tivated?”
“Sadly.”
A laugh sticks in the back of his throat. “I’ll work on it then.”
I don’t tell him not to.
He jogs across the yard, gets in his truck, and tosses me a wave as he drives away.
When I finish the job two hours later—after changing my shoes—the yard is a wreck. Nothing is even, patches have been missed, and clumps of grass I kept digging out of the blade lay in haphazard piles, already half dead in the midday sun.
That evening, I go to the grocery store. When I get home, Gavin’s truck is in his driveway, and the piles are gone.
The yard’s been mowed clean.