The Checkbook
I found it in her checkbook the night I got home.
I wasn’t snooping. I want that on the record. It was almost midnight, and Grandma had gone to bed, and I couldn’t sleep because my body still thought it was morning somewhere on the other side of the world. So I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk, and her checkbook was sitting open on the table next to the sugar bowl, the way it always was.
She still writes checks. Paper ones. In blue ink, in that slanted cursive they used to teach in Missouri schools in 1955. She balances her register every Sunday after church with a pencil and a calculator the size of a paperback book.
I glanced down at it while I poured my milk. Just a glance.
Then I set the jug down and pulled out a chair.
The register went back eleven months. All the way back to last August, the week I shipped out.
Most of it was what you’d expect from a seventy-eight-year-old widow on a fixed income. Ameren Missouri, eighty-four dollars. Cedar Ridge Water, thirty-one. Walmart pharmacy, twelve. Church offering, twenty, every single week, never missed.
And then, once a month, in the same slanted blue cursive:
Ray. 400.
I turned the page.
Ray. 400.
I turned the page again.
Ray. 400.
Every month I was gone. Eleven times. Next to the first one, in pencil, she’d written in small letters: lawn.
I sat there at that kitchen table for a long time.
Grandma’s Social Security check is eleven hundred and six dollars a month. I know that because I helped her set up the direct deposit when I was sixteen. That’s all she has. Grandpa’s railroad pension died with him, because he took the bigger payout and nobody told her what that meant.
Eleven hundred dollars.
And my uncle had been taking four hundred of it. More than a third. Every month for almost a year.
To mow a quarter-acre yard.
I did the math in my head. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop it. Eleven months. Four thousand, four hundred dollars.
Overseas, I had made a little extra for being deployed. Hostile fire pay, family separation pay, the tax break. I’d saved almost all of it. I’d been planning to use some of it to fix the hole in Grandma’s back porch roof and maybe get her a new recliner, because the old one leaned to the left and squeaked every time she sat down.
Meanwhile, back home, she’d been paying her own son more than her electric, water, and grocery bills put together. To cut her grass.
I closed the checkbook. I squared it next to the sugar bowl the way she likes it. I washed my glass and set it in the drainer.
Then I went out to the back porch and stood there in the dark, in my socks, looking at the yard.
I grew up on that yard.
I learned to throw a football on it. I buried two dogs and a hamster under the redbud tree in the corner. I broke my arm falling out of the oak by the fence when I was nine, and Grandma drove me to the hospital in Rolla in her nightgown with her hair in curlers.
It was the yard where I stood with my hands in my pockets the afternoon they told me about my dad.
In the dark, I couldn’t see much. But I could smell it. Cut grass. Old, the way it gets when somebody mows it with a dull blade and leaves the clippings in clumps to rot.
My grandmother’s yard had never once smelled like that while my grandpa was alive. Or while I lived there.
Chapter Two: Eggs
Saturday morning, she fried me eggs.
She was up before me, which shouldn’t have surprised me but did. She’s been getting up at five-fifteen since she was a girl on a dairy farm outside Licking. When I came into the kitchen at six-thirty in my sweatpants, she was already standing at the stove in her blue housecoat, with bacon popping in the cast iron skillet and the radio playing the farm report.
“There’s my Marine,” she said, without turning around. “Sit down. Coffee’s on.”
I sat. She put a cup in front of me. Black, with one sugar. She remembered.
Her name is Opal Gaines. She’s four foot eleven and maybe ninety pounds if she’s holding a cat. She’s got white hair she sets in pink foam curlers every Saturday night so it’ll look nice for church. Her hands are covered in brown spots and they shake a little now, but she still cracked those eggs one-handed, the way she always did.
“Over easy?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know, I know. I was just checking you hadn’t changed on me.” She flipped them with a little flick of her wrist. “The Marines didn’t make you start eating them scrambled, did they?”
“No, ma’am. Scrambled’s all they serve. I’m starving for over easy.”
She laughed. I loved that laugh. I hadn’t heard it in eleven months, except for once on a bad phone connection at Christmas.
She set the plate down in front of me. Two eggs, four strips of bacon, a biscuit with butter melting into it, a spoonful of her own blackberry jam.
I ate the whole thing in about four minutes. She stood by the counter and watched me with her arms crossed, smiling.
Then I set down my fork.
“Grandma,” I said. “Who’s been cutting the grass?”
Her face closed up like a screen door.
Just like that. One second it was wide open, warm and smiling. The next second it shut, and I could see her pulling something closed behind her eyes. Latching it.
“Your uncle’s been seeing to it,” she said.
She turned back to the stove. She picked up the skillet and started scraping it with a spatula, even though it was already clean.
“How much does that cost you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She looked out the window over the sink. Out at the yard.
“It’s family helping family, Hunter,” she said.
“But he puts four hundred on it, Grandma.”
She went still. Her hand stopped scraping.
“You were in my checkbook,” she said quietly.
“It was open on the table. I wasn’t snooping. I promise.”
She set the skillet down. She turned on the water in the sink and ran it, even though there was nothing in the sink to wash. She held her hands under it.
“He’s my son, Hunter,” she said.
“I know he is.”
“He’s had a hard time. Things are tight for him. Sheila’s been after him about money. He needs the work.”
“Four hundred dollars a month, Grandma. That’s a third of your check.”
She turned off the water. She didn’t look at me.
“I am not going to make a war over grass,” she said. 