And a grown man in a shined truck turned his head like he was nine years old and had tracked mud on her kitchen floor.
He looked up at the porch.
Grandma was standing up. I hadn’t seen her stand up all day. She was standing at the top of her porch steps in her blue housecoat, holding onto the railing with one hand.
“Turn that truck off,” she said. “And come up here.”
Ray looked at me. Then at the ladies under the oak tree. Then back at his mother.
Then he turned off the truck.
Chapter Eight: What Grandma Said
The silence was enormous.
When a Cummins diesel shuts off, it’s like the whole world stops vibrating at once. Even the cicadas seemed to go quiet. The country music cut off in the middle of a line.
Ray opened his door and climbed down off his chrome running board. He was wearing jeans and a Bass Pro Shops polo shirt and sunglasses on a cord around his neck. He walked across Grandma’s front yard, across my fresh stripes, and stopped at the bottom of her porch steps.
He didn’t go up. He stood at the bottom, looking up at her.
I followed him. I stopped at the edge of the grass, a few feet behind him.
“Mama,” Ray said. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you…”
“He hasn’t told me a thing,” Grandma said. “He’s been cutting grass.”
“Then what’s all this about?”
Grandma looked at him for a long time. She held onto the railing.
“I raised two boys in this house,” she said. “Your daddy and I. Two boys.”
“I know, Mama.”
“Danny used to mow Irene Kessler’s yard for two dollars. And then he’d come back and give her half of his candy bar.” She looked down the street at Mrs. Kessler, sitting in her wheelchair at the end of her driveway. “You remember that?”
Ray didn’t answer.
