BY MARCELO MEDONE
Copyright is held by the author.
“All the lawns on Fairfax Avenue are mowed on Thursdays.”
“Excuse me?”
“All the lawns on Fairfax Avenue are mowed only on Thursdays. You heard me right, son. I may be old, but I still know how to express myself clearly.”
I dropped the rusty lawn mower I had taken from my father’s shed and stared at him in surprise.
“How is that?” I finally managed to ask him.
“Absolutely all the neighbours here have agreed to make noise mowing the grass only on Thursday mornings. It would be uncivilized to do it on another day, for example, a Monday. Because today is Monday, right?”
“And who enacted that ordinance?”
“Pretty much all of them: the Samuelsons, the Irwings, the Merediths, the DiGiacomos, the Flynns, the Alonsos, the Harpers, the Langs, the Gaynors, even Janet Morris, a cranky spinster who lives on the next block with her seven grimy cats. To change the mowing day, we should all come together and agree. But I doubt we’ll have time to do it.”
I rubbed my hands on my pants, gathered my courage, and pointed to the front lawn of the house.
“Do you see the grass in your garden, Dad? Don’t you think that it needs to be attended? How long has it been since you mowed it?”
My father wore his best victim face and looked at me with pleading eyes.
“I was going to mow it two Thursdays ago, but that day my ankles hurt a lot. Probably because I forgot to take my gout medication. Moreover, I think I didn’t take my memory pills either. It would have been a real ordeal to mow the lawn that day. Besides, last week I just forgot. When I remembered, night was already falling.”
“You would have called me, and I would have helped you. I’ve done it other times. It doesn’t bother me. You know that my work schedule allows me to take a few mornings off.”
My father saw that my hands were still gripping the lawnmower and swallowed.
“Could you not mow the lawn today and do it in three days, this Thursday? I don’t want to violate the neighbourhood agreement.”
I was about to explain to him that on Thursday morning I had a presentation before the board of directors of my advertising agency, but I supposed that trying to convince him would be in vain. Just then, I heard the nearby sound of a lawn mower starting up. My father raised his eyebrows in astonishment and bolted to the front of the house. I abandoned the lawnmower and went after him.
I found him standing on the sidewalk, with his hands resting on his waist, clearly upset.
“It is a shame!” he told me. “Mowing the lawn on a Monday morning!” He pointed to a mature woman with a beautiful slender figure who was nonchalantly mowing the front lawn across the street, a couple of houses away.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“No. That’s where the Harpers lived. Until a few months ago, when they were found both dead in their beds. Looks like it was a gas leak. An accident or a suicide pact. Janet Morris told me.”
“Would it be their daughter?”
“I don’t think so. The Harpers had only one son, whose name I don’t remember. Maybe they sold the property.”
I looked at the overgrown lawn at the Harper’s old house and agreed that it needed a good mowing.
“Dad: I want you to stay here. I’m going to talk to your new neighbour. I will not be long.”
Therefore, I walked leisurely across Fairfax Avenue and met this lovely woman.
A while later I returned to my father and told him to enter the house.
“Dad,” I said, sitting at the dining room table, next to two steaming cups of tea. “Your new neighbour is called Harriet Kimball, she is sixty years old -a few years younger than you- she is a nurse, she is a widow, she lives alone, and she is retired. She told me that she bought the house a few weeks ago and that she would gladly come to have tea with you, that she is anxious to meet new neighbours. I told her that everyone here on Fairfax Avenue is very friendly and I told her not to worry about the stories she might hear about mowing days and times, as long as she didn’t make too much noise. Don’t tell her right away about all your illnesses, so you don’t scare her. She seems very nice.”
At that precise moment, Mrs. Kimball appeared, smiling, with a homemade apple pie in her hands.
I left them alone and went to meet the lawnmower.
Mondays are a good day to mow the lawn on Fairfax Avenue.
***
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries around the world, including Canada. He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
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