Lines Left

My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think about getting someone else to do it, maybe he could take a break, enjoy retirement, he looked at me like I’d suggested he take a bath with some morays, just for the thrill.

So, in retrospect, I don’t know why I expected death to be the thing that stopped him.

He’s shimmering like dew in the early morning light, pushing that old mower as if his funeral hadn’t been the day before, as if we hadn’t all wiped our tears and said our goodbyes and started planning how to move forward with our lives. You can finally do something with that damn yard, I’d said to my mom, somewhere between laughing and crying. Native flowers, vegetables, fescues, trees. I’d needled my dad about it for years, but he’d always shaken his head: but it’s such a nice-looking monoculture. 

I pour cold coffee from yesterday over ice, stir in cream as I watch him work. He is silver, not filled in, all one color with the mower, a picture flashing against the glass of the window. He could be an after-image, a film negative, the outline of something left behind, and I wait for him to dissipate. But when I step outside, he comes into focus, shining and bright. 

I tiptoe barefoot across the lawn as if my steps might wake the mourners still sleeping in the house behind me. The grass pokes up between my toes and I wiggle them into the damp earth as I wait.

“Dad,” I say, when his next row comes past me. “What are you doing here?”

“Lawn’s not gonna mow itself.” He doesn’t look at me as he says it, doesn’t bother to smile. The mower leaves tracks in the grass, the little green shoots bending and springing up again, not quite cut but not quite ignoring him, either. 

Condensation drips down the sides of my glass, leaving prickling cold rivulets over my fingers. Ice clinks when I swirl it, a sound my brain says I shouldn’t be able to hear. But the ghost-mower is silent.

“We’ll get someone to mow the lawn, Dad.”

“Don’t be silly.” He doesn’t stop, doesn’t seem to find it strange that we can have this conversation at normal volume, that he doesn’t have to pause the gas engine and talk in a cloud of fumes as it idles. “It’s my job.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Isn’t there something…else you should be doing?”

He coughs a laugh, the same raspy sound he always made when I surprised him. “Not before the grass gets mowed, Eloise. You know that.”

I follow him around the lawn, back and forth, watching the grass change into familiar stripes. I wonder if other people can see him or if a neighbor looking out their window will see only me, walking patterns into the lawn, chasing empty air. Will they think it is grief, manifesting in some harmless and pitiful way? Will they turn from the window, eyes full of that specific sort of relief that comes from watching a misfortune not your own, and shake their heads, whisper “so sad” to their partners?

But it’s not sad, I want to tell this probably imaginary watcher. My father lived to be 83. He had a good life and died peacefully. We will be okay. We can mow this lawn, dig it up and plant flowers, make it our own.

The ghost pushing the mower hasn’t gotten that memo yet, though.

He’s on the last row now, and I’ve taken to circling him, sometimes jumping in front of the mower, ducking down to try and see his face, his eyes. He isn’t ignoring me—at least, he isn’t ignoring me to be cruel. He’s just focused on his task. If he’d been alive, he would’ve asked me what in god’s name did I think I was doing, told me to get out of the way, I was going to get someone hurt. But he doesn’t say it.

He comes to the end of the row and spins the mower in a circle, a flourish like a period that always made me roll my eyes. End, stop, finished. But when he looks up, finally looks at me, he is smiling. He wipes invisible sweat from his brow.

“No reward like a job well done,” he says, hands on hips, surveying his work. Then he vanishes.

I don’t stare at the spot where he vanished but at the lawn, at the lines he left that still glisten in the sun. The pattern that is uniquely his, still etched in light and shadow upon the world.