John Jodzio - Knockout

“Did my husband send you?” I yelled.

The man was rail thin and about five feet tall. He wore a white tank top and black jeans. It looked like he had a teardrop tattoo below his left eye, but as I got closer to him I realized it was just a teardrop-shaped piece of dirt.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I sent myself.”

I watched him as he loaded the lawn mower into his truck. He was chewing on a red cocktail straw, really working it over. I’d seen him around here before; he cut a few of my neighbor’s lawns too.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ronnie,” he said.

“Ronnie, you’re positive no one named David Hallberg hired you for this?”

“Lady,” he said. “I saw this mess and I cut it down. And now I’d like my twenty bucks.”

I pretended to cough, and then to soothe my pretend cough I took a long swallow off my bottle of cough syrup. I was doing what any sane person would do in my circumstances — I was drinking large amounts of cherry-flavored cough syrup and interrogating anyone who crossed my path for any information they had about David.

“Did David pay you to keep quiet?” I asked. “Was that part of your deal?”

I was at least a head taller than Ronnie and much thicker in my upper body. I felt a sudden urge to pick him up and shake him until he told me the truth, but I’d done this to a couple of people over the past week and it hadn’t worked out well. Instead, I handed him the picture of David that I kept in my wallet for occasions such as this.

“Is this the man?” I asked.

Ronnie studied the picture, pushed it back at me.

“Lady,” he told me, “I don’t know who this guy is.”

After Ronnie left, I took a nap. When I woke, I scratched under my left boob and a ballpoint pen fell out. I lifted up my other tit to see if there was anything hidden under there and a cocktail napkin floated to the ground. I looked closer at the napkin. The phrase “A high tide lifts all boats!” was written on it. I immediately called my friend Liza.

“You don’t know how that stuff got there?” she asked.

“I used to hide things under my tits for David,” I told her. “He was into that. Maybe I put that stuff under there and forgot it was there. Or maybe David snuck in here last night and put it under there for me to find.”

I remembered some of the gifts I’d hidden under my tits for David. One year, there was a gold watch. Another time, a bottle of cologne. Once on Cinco de Mayo, there was a chicken soft taco. The more I thought about the cocktail napkin now, the more it sounded like David. Maybe he was surprising me. Maybe he was announcing his return by hiding things in the cracks and crevasses of my body while I slept.

“Maybe you should cool it with the cough syrup,” Liza said.

Liza was my best friend. She was recently divorced. Usually it didn’t bother me that she couldn’t see all the possibility and wonder I saw in the world. Lately though, I couldn’t understand why she was not seeing the things I saw so clearly, all these signs that David was afoot.

“He’s not coming back,” she said. “You understand that, right?”

I remembered how David had slid out of our bed in the middle of the night, how he’d stuck a Post-it note to my forehead that said “Don’t hold your breath.” For the last few weeks I’d thought he was gone for good, but now there was this cocktail napkin. Now it was obvious to me that David was orchestrating his return. It made total sense.

“Oh,” I told Liza. “He’s definitely coming back.”

Afew days after he first cut my lawn, Ronnie returned to cut it again. He was in his tank top and black jeans again, pushing his mower across my yard. His truck was parked on the street in front of my house, the back of it filled with twigs and brush.

“You’re on my route now,” he told me.

He was so damn skinny — there were not many spots on his body to hide anything fun or important.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means I come once or twice a week and clean up your yard,” he said.

I didn’t know if I wanted this service, but sometimes when I called Liza she didn’t return my phone calls. She wasn’t the only one — lately a number of my friends were doing the same thing. Maybe it would be nice to know there would be someone that kept tabs on me.

“Can I stop being on your route when David returns?” I asked.

“Sure,” Ronnie said. “You just tell me when you want to stop being on my route and then I stop showing up.”

The next day, I decided to get back in shape. First, I’d walk around the block. Then slowly, day by day, I would venture out farther and farther with greater and greater speed. Soon I’d do a 10K fun run. When David returned, he would find an improved version of me — a toned, energetic runner.

After a couple of minutes of walking around my neighborhood my tit began to itch. I reached into my sports bra to scratch it and found some Chex Mix in there. Under my other boob I found a scrap of paper that had the words “Never apologize for anything you like!” written on it. As I sat down on the curb and washed the Chex Mix down with some cough syrup, I looked at the note more closely. It looked way more like David’s writing than mine.

“He’s getting closer,” I told Liza.

“He’s the same distance he’s always been,” Liza said.

Afew days later, I woke to the sound of a lawn mower and there was Ronnie again. I handed him his money.

“Do you do inside work?” I said.

There were a number of things in my house that had started to break since David had gone and I thought it would be nice to get them fixed before he returned.

“Inside work?” Ronnie asked.

“Like moving furniture. Like plumbing and painting. Inside work.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Then come back tomorrow at noon,” I told him.

The first thing I had Ronnie do was fix my clogged kitchen sink. Then I had him paint the kitchen cabinets. While he painted, I collected all of the items that I’d found under my breasts so far and lined them up on top of my dining room table. I inspected everything very carefully, picked up each one of the notes and held them up to the light, hoping they would provide some clues for when David would return.

Later that afternoon, Ronnie ran out of paint and I gave him fifty dollars to go to the hardware store. I didn’t expect him to return. I expected him to take the fifty dollars and disappear on me just like David had. I was mistaken about Ronnie though. He returned in a half hour. And besides the paint, he was holding a bouquet of wildflowers.

“This is to say thank you for hiring me to do all this extra work,” he said. “I can really use the money right now.”

I found a vase and set the flowers on my dining room table. As I watched Ronnie work, I had another idea. Maybe if David was watching me from somewhere nearby, maybe I could use Ronnie to make him jealous.

While Ronnie was painting, I snuck up behind him and slid my arms around his chest. When he spun toward me, I put my lips on his and slipped my tongue into his mouth. My eyes were trained on the front door while I kissed him. I was waiting for David to burst through into the house and throttle Ronnie for making out with his wife, but nothing happened. The only sound I heard was the keys on Ronnie’s keychain jingling as he pulled away from me.

“That was very nice,” he said, “but I probably better get back to work.”

Ronnie was supposed to help clean out my basement the next day, but I didn’t answer the door when he began to knock. That morning I’d found a note with the phrase “Taking care of yourself means telling yourself thank you!” underneath my right tit. There were also some M&M’s and a Marlboro Light there. I had eaten the M&M’s long ago, but had tucked the cigarette back under there for safekeeping.