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.
