Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

He tilted his head. “You’ve been busy. We all have. Sometimes I get a chance to steal away quietly, so I take it, yes? It’s gotten harder to do these days, but I can still find an opening sometimes.”

“You really used to scare the hell out of me with that. You know that, right?”

Jake dipped his head and shifted weight to his right leg, causing their elbows to touch. “I do. I’m sorry. We all have… things to deal with. It’s like your walks.”

“Tell me. Jake… just talk to me.”

His eyes unfocused by a minuscule degree as he looked down at the slurry of mud and dirty snow below the porch. He stood there like that, breathing through parted lips, and Amanda felt her pulse quicken when she sensed he was about to say something. Something was coming. Something different was about to happen.

Far off in the distance, the sound of a closing door caused him to look up. His eyes zeroed in again, and he whispered, “Hah, right on time.”

Amanda followed his gaze, biting her lip in frustration. Monica had emerged from her home, geared up from the waist down for the weather, though she had only a flannel, a cap, and gloves on up top, so far as Amanda could tell. She made her way carefully around the perimeter of her house towards the old, green John Deere riding mower that Jake had helped her to deposit outside her home. She climbed onto it, crossed her arms against the cold, and tilted her head up against the coming sun. Amanda could only see the back of her head from the porch, but she would have bet even money that Monica’s eyes were closed; she had that kind of posture as she sat in the seat.

“Beautiful…” Jake whispered.

“It seems crazy to me,” Amanda whispered back. “That mower just sits there. The only use it ever sees is when she comes out in the morning to sit on it while the sun rises. Why wouldn’t she just get a chair? We could even go grab her a nice patio set…”

Jake rocked gently under a silent laugh, no more than a voiceless contraction of muscle in his trunk. He tilted his head to the right, leaning closer to Amanda, and whispered, “No, she insisted on a riding mower. A John Deere, specifically.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Of course not.” He took a sip of coffee and said, “When she came to me to ask for help in collecting it, I didn’t understand either. I went off on this long tangent about the scarcity of gas, the fact that we didn’t actually have any true grass to mow, how all the rocks in the soil would damage the blades… She stopped me from rambling by laying a hand on my arm and explaining that she didn’t intend to run the thing; she only wanted to sit on it. Naturally, I had the same reaction as you. I offered to take her into town and pick out a set of outdoor furniture.”

“And?”

Jake sighed. “What do you know about her husband?”

Amanda was taken aback, not having anticipated the turn in conversation. “Well… not much, I guess. I know she loved him. She misses him…”

He nodded. “She does, indeed. As she explained to me, her husband worked hard, but he didn’t make anywhere near as much money as her. She was in the union and pulled a lot of overtime at the prison due to her seniority, so she was basically the breadwinner, and his income was supplemental.”

Amanda sniffed from the cold and took a sip of her drink. She tried to imagine being the one in a relationship that carried the financial load and found the exercise difficult.

Jake continued: “They had a house together and, coming from a family that tended not to own their homes, Lloyd took immense pride in its upkeep. Every Saturday, without fail, he would tend to the yard, starting with mowing the lawn. She explained to me that one of the things her husband had dreamed about having since before they were married was a John Deere riding mower.”

Amanda pulled her eyes from Jake to look back out at Monica, sitting bolt upright on her mower, head tilted back and waiting for the sun. Amanda’s mouth fell open slightly, and she felt her chest begin to constrict. Her vision blurred.

“She used to poke fun at him for this. They didn’t have a giant yard, you see, and she used to laugh, saying how ridiculous he would look riding the thing over their little patch of grass. He didn’t really care, though. He continued to dream. He never told her as much, but Monica said she suspected that he’d tied the idea of the mower to success in his mind. That he had decided that, on the day he had his riding mower, he would be an established homeowner, with all of the things homeowners were supposed to have.

“But they didn’t have the money for it, sadly. What they had was a mortgage and their little girl, Rose. He became enamored of his daughter, fell in love all over again, as Monica describes it, and put his notions of a riding mower aside. He threw his energy into that girl, becoming ‘completely besotted’… Monica’s words. His idea—or conception—of success altered, yes? Altered from a riding mower to a happy, giggling daughter.”

Jake set down his now-empty coffee cup. Out of the corner of her vision, Amanda saw him brace both hands on the railing; heard him sigh.

“They raised that girl up together, and Monica thought about her husband’s odd, seemingly abandoned obsession less and less over the years, reminded of it again only whenever they happened through the occasional home improvement store. Whereas other husbands would slow down and peruse through the barbecues or power tools, Lloyd stopped by the riding mowers. He always gravitated towards the same one, the green John Deere, and would rub the palm of his hand gently over the seat. He would smile and walk away from it, would take up Rose’s hand in his, and Monica knew that he was content but that he also still remembered.”

He stopped talking a moment. Amanda was tempted to look up at him but was afraid to do so. She didn’t want to distract him or somehow push him onto another topic. He could shift gears faster than anyone she’d ever met; all it took was a nudge at the wrong (or right) time. He rarely ever spoke on a single subject at such length, unless it had to do with building some new thing out in the Bowl.

He cleared his throat. “I, uh, I guess she had saved some money up… was going to buy him one for his birthday. She’d had to sock cash away over time, and it had been difficult while contending with Christmases, vacations, and just life in general, but she’d managed to get it done after a while. She was just about to pull the trigger on buying one, right before the Flare hit.”

Amanda moaned lightly, something low and inarticulate. It was a sound reserved for funerals and broken hearts. Beyond the edge of her aching grief, she heard the railing creak under Jake’s hands. The door to Monica’s home opened, and Wang emerged, moving slowly and carefully on his crutches through the slush. A heavy blanket was draped across his shoulders like the fur-trimmed cape of a king. He approached Monica wordlessly and wedged his knee up against the side of the mower for support. Though she paid him no heed, he disentangled his arms from the crutches, laid them against the back of the mower, and then enfolded the blanket around her, overlapping it carefully across her arms. He remained next to her, right arm wrapped around her shoulders, and she rested her head against him.

“Now, tell me: would you have ever seen that coming in a hundred years?” Jake asked.

Amanda looked up at him and saw that he was smiling. It was warm, making his battered face handsome. As she looked, a tear dropped from his eye and caught in his beard. She removed her left glove and placed her hand over his. It was paradoxically warm, and she could feel the tensing of his muscles throughout the surface, as though there were a writhing bundle of snakes just underneath the skin. The sun finally peeked up over the mountain ridge, bathing them in warm light. He drew in a breath and his smile broadened.