I Hired a Teenager to Mow My Lawn for the Summer—Then I Caught Him Inside My Locked Garage

I pulled into my driveway early one afternoon and immediately knew something was wrong. Chase’s battered red mower was still running in the backyard, one strip of grass half-cut, but the fifteen-year-old boy I had hired weeks earlier was nowhere in sight. Then I saw the detached garage door standing open. I had never used that garage, and the only key had been in my pocket since the day I bought the house. Seconds later, Chase came jogging out of the dim interior and froze when he saw me. When I demanded to know how he had gotten inside, he insisted the door had been open—then glanced back and asked, almost without thinking, “You keep it locked now?” I had never told him it had ever been unlocked.

I’m Rick, and I had bought the place only a month earlier when Chase first appeared on my porch pushing that worn mower and asking if I needed help with the overgrown lawn. He charged $25; I paid him $50 because he worked harder and more carefully than most professionals I had hired. Every Saturday at exactly eight, he came back, cutting straight rows without a phone, earbuds or excuses, and every week I noticed him staring toward the garage. His face also bothered me because it seemed oddly familiar, although I could never place where I had seen him. After I confronted him about entering the garage, Chase disappeared for nearly two weeks. Then I spotted him outside a grocery store climbing into a new black SUV wearing expensive clothes and a watch that did not fit the story he had told me about living with his mother in Cedar Creek Trailer Park. I began wondering whether I had misunderstood the boy completely. When he finally returned to my door with the old mower, however, the truth was stranger and considerably sadder than anything I had imagined.

The man driving the SUV was Chase’s father, Christian, whom a custody order required him to visit every other weekend. The designer clothes stayed at his father’s house; Chase called them his “weekend clothes.” Christian bought expensive things but had rarely been present for baseball games, ordinary afternoons or the moments Chase actually remembered. Then Chase finally told me why he had chosen my yard. His family had owned my house before me. His grandfather had built the workbench inside the garage, taught Chase to ride a bicycle on its concrete floor and spent rainy afternoons with him listening to water strike the roof. After Grandpa died, Chase’s mother could no longer keep up with the mortgage, and although Christian had money, disputes over support dragged on until the house was already lost. Chase continued riding his bicycle past the property afterward, and when he saw me move in, he invented the lawn-mowing job because he wanted an excuse to return. “If I couldn’t live here anymore,” he said, looking toward the garage, “maybe I could still take care of it.” When I asked why he had entered the locked building, he lowered his eyes and said he had simply wanted to sit at his grandfather’s workbench. “I forgot it wasn’t ours anymore.”