Some days he felt like a real moron for still giving two shits about mowing the lawn.

It was a really beautiful lawn, before. He had mowed it with pride every Saturday, and Bev had that prize-winning vegetable garden. They spent a lot of happy hours in the yard, getting dirty and laughing together, then going inside and having the kind of easy tender sex that people who have been married 30 years sometimes have.

That was before. He tried to maintain her vegetables but they didn’t seem to want to go on living after Bev was gone. And the picket fence that he’d built himself had long since been replaced with a chain link and barbed-wire monstrosity. It was ugly and it didn’t help the property values, but it held strong when those things hurled their rotting bodies against it.

The house wasn’t much to look at now, not that there was anyone around to care. The lawn was brown in patches now, not thick like it used to be. He still mowed it every Saturday. Gave him something to do, besides missing her.