By Bryan Vale

Heather had just poured her mango LaCroix into a tall glass with three ice cubes when the doorbell interrupted her reverie. Sighing, she put the beverage next to her phone on the glass-topped table and made haste into the front room. The left side of the double front doors revealed a scrawny kid in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and work boots. Then something her husband had said on his way to the lake clicked into place in her mind and she said, “Oh! Are you the gardener?”

“Lawn care specialist,” replied the kid in a scratchy voice.

“Are you here to mow the lawn?”

“Aerate the lawn. Just letting you know I’ma be out front here. Should take ’bout,” the kid leaned and looked at the wide green lawn, “15 minutes or so.”

“Thank you!” said Heather. She shut the door. She returned to the glass-topped table, held up her phone, and opened the next book in her series; the words of the first page glowed on the screen. As she sipped the sparkling water it occurred to her that the sound coming from out front was not that of a lawnmower. Had the sprinklers come on? They were about due, she thought.

She went into the front room and peered through the window. The kid was straining in the sun, pushing a big machine that looked a little like a lawnmower but heavier. Hollow spikes stuck out of a big drum in back of the machine. She watched as the kid paused at the foot of a gentle slope at the lawn’s end; for a moment it seemed the slope would be too steep and the machine too heavy; but, face red and lips compressed, the kid made it up the rise. Cylindrical chunks of dirt fell in his wake.

Similar chunks of dirt were now sprayed all over her beautiful lawn, everywhere the kid had been with his machine.

Heather hurried outside. “Hey!” she called from the porch. The kid didn’t hear her. “Excuse me? Mister gardener?”

The kid turned off the machine and looked up. “Lawn care specialist.”

She pointed to the chunks of dirt. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Yep.”

“What are you doing, exactly? The grass doesn’t look any shorter.”

“Not mowing. Aerating.”

“What?”

“Poking holes. In the dirt. To let the water come in better.”

Heather was puzzled. “And we’re paying for this?”

“Believe so.”

“Okay, well…thank you!”

The kid nodded and resumed his work.

Heather reclaimed her seat on the couch. She picked up the glass of water and took a gulp. Grass absorbing water…water…there was something else to remember, what was it…

Water!

Sprinklers!

Heather raced to open the front door. “Gardener!” she called. “The sprinklers are about to — ”

With a hiss the sprinklers popped out of their hidden places in the grass and sprayed the lawn. The kid, in the middle of the spray, turned to Heather, soaking wet.

“Lawn care specialist,” he said.

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 Bryan Vale is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Streetcake Magazine, Paragraph Planet, Unstamatic Magazine, and Paddler Press. His work has been nominated for The Best of the Net, and he has read for the memoir journal Five Minutes. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram at @bryanvalewriter.