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.
