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Who knew a metal trash can would be so hard to find?
Wal-Mart had only the plastic kind in stock. She invested in one for herself, but didn’t feel she had the right to change her neighbor’s type of trash can. From there she drove to a home-and-garden supply store, but struck out there, too. If she had bought her own metal can she would have known where to find another one, but it had been a housewarming present from her mother—that was Mom, Queen of the Practical Gift.
By the time she finally located a large metal trash can, at a hardware store—well, duh—it was nine o’clock and the temperature was already edging out of warm into uncomfortable. If she didn’t get the grass mowed soon, she would have to wait until sundown for the heat to abate. Deciding that grocery shopping could wait, she wedged the can into her minuscule backseat and headed south on Van Dyke until she reached Ten Mile Road, then turned right. Minutes later she turned onto her street and smiled at the neat, older houses nestled under their mature shade trees.
A few of the houses had tricycles and bicycles on the front lawns. These older neighborhoods were seeing an influx of younger couples as they discovered the reasonable price of the aging houses. Instead of disintegrating, the houses were receiving face-lifts and remodels; in a few years, the price of real estate would shoot up again, but for now this area was just right for people just starting out.
As she got out of the car, the neighbor on the other side of her house walked over to the waist-high white picket fence separating the properties and waved. “Good morning!” Mrs. Kulavich called.
“Good morning,” Jaine replied. She had met the pleasant old couple the day she moved in, and Mrs. Kulavich had brought her a nice thick pot of stew the next day, with fragrant homemade rolls. If only the jerk on the other side could have been more like the Kulavichs, Jaine would have been in seventh heaven, though she couldn’t even begin to picture him bringing her homemade rolls.
She walked over to the fence for a neighborly chat. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Thank God for weather, because the world would be hard up for a conversational gambit without it.
“Oh, my, it’s going to be a scorcher.” Mrs. Kulavich beamed at her and brandished a trowel in one gloved hand. “I have to do my gardening early, before it gets too hot.”
“I had the same idea about mowing my lawn this morning.” Others were of the same mind, she noticed. Now that she was paying attention, she could hear the roar of a lawn mower three doors up from Mrs. Kulavich and another across the street.
“Smart girl. Take care not to get too hot; my George always wets a towel and puts it on the back of his neck when he mows, though our grandsons help him with the mowing and he doesn’t do it as often as he used to.” She winked. “I think he cranks up the old mower now just because he’s in the mood to do something manly.”
Jaine smiled and started to excuse herself, but something occurred to her and she turned back to the old lady. “Mrs. Kulavich, do you know the man who lives on the other side of me?” What if the jerk had lied to her? What if he wasn’t really a cop? She could just see him having a good laugh at her expense, while she tiptoed around and tried to be nice to him.
“Sam? My, yes, I’ve known him all his life. His grandparents used to live there, you know. Lovely people. I was so glad when Sam moved in after his grandmother finally passed last year. I feel much safer having a policeman so close by, don’t you?”
Well, that shot that theory in the ass. Jaine managed a smile. “Yes, of course.” She started to say something about the strange hours he kept, but saw the gleam in Mrs. Kulavich’s bright blue eyes and bit back the words. The last thing she needed was for her elderly neighbor to think she had any interest in the jerk and maybe tell him, since Mrs. Kulavich was obviously on good terms with him. She took care of that by adding, “I thought he might be a drug dealer or something.”
Mrs. Kulavich looked scandalized. “Sam, a drug dealer? Oh, my. No, he would never do anything like that.”
“That’s a relief.” Jaine smiled again. “I suppose I’d better start mowing before it gets much hotter.”
“Be sure to drink plenty of water,” Mrs. Kulavich called after her.
“I will.”
Well, drat, Jane thought as she wrestled the trash can out of her backseat. The jerk was a cop; he hadn’t lied. There went her dream of seeing him hauled away in handcuffs.
She deposited the can by his back porch, then released the plastic can she had bought for herself from the trunk. If the can hadn’t been plastic, she never could have gotten it in there, but plastic compressed. When she opened the trunk, it sprang at her like something alive. She put the can behind her small kitchen stoop, neatly out of sight from the street, then went inside and quickly changed into shorts and a halter top. That was what suburban ladies wore to mow their lawns, wasn’t it? Then she remembered her older neighbors, and changed the halter top for a T-shirt; she didn’t want to give some old gent a heart attack.
She felt a thrill of anticipation as she unlocked the padlock on the garage doors and slipped inside, fumbling until she reached the switch that turned on the single overhead light. Her dad’s pride and joy sat there, completely covered by a custom-made canvas tarp, lined with felt so it wouldn’t scratch the paint. Damn, she wished he had left it at David’s. The car wasn’t as much trouble as BooBoo, but she worried about it a lot more.
The deciding factor in leaving it at her house, she thought, was that her garage still had the old-fashioned double doors rather than a modern garage door that slid up. Her dad worried about the car being seen from the street; she could get into her garage without opening the doors more than the twelve inches required for her to slip through, while everything in David’s double garage was visible every time he raised his door. First chance she got, she was putting in an automatic garage door.
She had covered her new lawn mower with a sheet so it wouldn’t get dusty. She removed the sheet and stroked her hand over the cool metal. Maybe her lowtech garage wasn’t the deciding factor in her baby-sitting the car; maybe it was because she was the only one of her dad’s children who shared his enthusiasm for cars. She was the one who had hung over the fender of their family sedan, staring into the mysterious mechanical bowels as her dad changed the oil and spark plugs. By the time she was ten, she had been helping him. By the time she was twelve, she had taken over the chore. For a while she had considered going into automotive mechanical engineering, but the training took years and she wasn’t really that ambitious. All she wanted was a job that paid well and that she didn’t hate, and she was as good with numbers as she was with motors. She enjoyed cars; she didn’t want to turn them into a job.
She wheeled her lawn mower past her dad’s car, taking care not to touch it. The canvas tarp protected it from the ground up, but she didn’t take any chances where that car was concerned. Opening one of the garage doors only enough to let her get the lawn mower out, she ushered her new baby out into the sunlight. The red paint gleamed; the chrome handlebars glistened. Oh, it was pretty.
At the last minute, she remembered something about the mowing ritual, and moved her car to the street; one had to be careful about accidentally slinging a rock that could break a window or chip a paint job. She looked at the jerk’s car and shrugged; he might notice BooBoo’s paw prints, but he’d never notice another dent in that thing.
With a happy smile, she fired up the little motor.
The thing about cutting grass,
she discovered, was that you had an instant sense of achievement. You could see exactly where you had been and what you had accomplished. Her dad and David had always taken care of that chore when she was growing up, much to her relief, because mowing the lawn had looked boring. Only as she had grown older had she seen the lure of having your own grass, and now she felt as if she had finally, at the age of thirty, stepped into full adulthood. She was a home owner. She mowed her lawn. Cool.
Something tapped her on the shoulder.
She shrieked and released the lawn mower handles, jumping to one side and whirling to face her attacker. The mower stopped in its tracks.
The jerk stood there, bloodshot eyes, snarl on his face, dirty clothes: his usual presentation. He reached over and slid the lever on the mower to the off position, and the efficient little engine growled to a stop.
