I paid it from my deployment savings. Thirteen hundred and twelve dollars and forty-six cents. Brenda stamped the receipt PAID IN FULL in blue ink and handed it to me.
A real receipt. Printed. With a county seal.
I sat in my rented Corolla in the courthouse parking lot for a long time afterward. I held that receipt in one hand and Ray’s spiral notebook receipt in the other.
Then I drove to my uncle’s house.
Chapter Ten: Supper
Ray and Sheila lived in a brick split-level out on County Road H, on three acres. Sheila worked as a receptionist at the dentist’s office in St. Robert. Their kids were grown and gone. One in Springfield, one in the Army at Fort Leonard Wood.
The white Ram was parked in the driveway. Ray was sitting on the front steps when I pulled in. Like he’d been waiting.
He didn’t get up. He watched me walk across the yard. I could tell from his face he knew.
I held out the county receipt.
“Paid in full,” I said. “Thirteen hundred twelve dollars and forty-six cents. Fourth Monday in August, they would have sold Grandma’s taxes to a stranger.”
He took the receipt. He looked at it for a long time.
“I was going to pay it,” he said. “I swear to God, Hunter. I was going to pay it in January. Then the truck payment came. And then I was going to pay it in February. And then I thought, I’ll get a job by spring, and I’ll pay it, and she’ll never know.”
“You gave her a fake receipt.”
“I know.”
“Out of a spiral notebook.”
“I know.” He put his face in his hands. “I know.”
The front door opened behind him. Sheila came out on the porch in her dentist office scrubs. She looked at me. Then at Ray. Then at the receipt in his hand.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Ray? What’s that?”
Ray didn’t answer.
“Ray. Hunter. What is going on?”
I looked at my uncle. He looked up at me. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff.
“Tell her,” I said. “Or I will.”
He told her.
All of it. Right there on the front steps. The plant. The layoff in August. Driving around every day in his work boots. The truck payment. The lawn money. The widows. Tyler. Grandma’s taxes.
Sheila sat down on the porch swing halfway through. By the end, she had both hands over her mouth.
“Eleven months,” she said. “You’ve been lying to me for eleven months?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Every morning you kissed me goodbye and said have a good day at work.”
“I’m sorry, Sheila.”
“You took money from Opal?” Her voice went up. “From Opal? On her Social Security?”
Ray couldn’t answer.
Sheila stood up. She came down the porch steps and stood in front of me.
“Hunter,” she said. “Come to supper Sunday. You and Opal. At six.” She looked at Ray. “We’re going to sit down as a family and fix this. All of it. And we’re going to do it before anybody loses a house.”
Sunday supper was at Grandma’s, actually. Sheila called and said Grandma should be in her own kitchen, and that she’d bring the food.
She brought pot roast. Ray brought nothing. He stood in the doorway of Grandma’s kitchen like a man walking into church late.
Grandma looked up at him from the stove.
“Sit down, Raymond,” she said. “You look like you’re going to fall over.”
He sat.
We worked it out at that kitchen table. All four of us. With Grandma’s checkbook and her calculator the size of a paperback book.
Ray owed Grandma forty-four hundred dollars for the lawn. Plus twelve hundred for the taxes he never paid. He owed Miss Edna four hundred. Mrs. Banks six hundred. Mrs. Halloway five hundred. Mrs. Kessler four hundred. Tyler Simms two hundred for May and June.
I added it up. Seven thousand, seven hundred dollars.
“I don’t have it,” Ray said. “I don’t have any of it.”
“You have a truck,” Sheila said.
Ray looked at her.
“That truck is worth fifty-two thousand dollars,” Sheila said. “You owe forty-one on it. You sell it on Monday, you clear eleven thousand. That pays back every single person on Locust Street and the taxes, with money left over.”
“Sheila…”
“Or,” she said, “I can call the bank about the truck myself. And then I can call a lawyer about our marriage.”
Ray stared at her.
Then he looked at Grandma.
“Mama,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
Grandma took off her reading glasses. She folded them and set them on top of the checkbook.
“I don’t want anything from you, Raymond,” she said. “Except one thing.”
“What?”
“I want you to cut my grass,” she said. “Yourself. Every Saturday. Not Tyler. Not anybody else. You. With your daddy’s mower. In straight lines.”
Ray didn’t say anything.
“And when you’re done with mine,” Grandma said, “you’re going to cut Edna’s. And Dorothy’s. And Margaret’s. And Irene’s. And Archie’s. Every widow on Locust Street. Every Saturday. For free. Until the end of the season.”
She looked at him.
“That’s what your daddy would’ve had you do,” she said. “That’s what Danny would’ve done.”
Chapter Eleven: Straight Lines
Ray sold the truck on Wednesday.
He sold it to a dealer in Springfield for forty-nine thousand, five hundred. After paying off the loan, he cleared eight thousand, two hundred and some. He bought a 2009 Ford Ranger with a dented tailgate from a guy in Licking for three thousand cash.
On Thursday, he drove that Ranger down Locust Street and stopped at every single house. He knocked on every door. He handed every woman an envelope with cash in it and an apology.
Miss Edna told me about it later. She said he stood on her porch with his hat in his hands and cried.
“I told him I forgave him,” she said. “And then I told him he still needed to work on his spelling. He wrote ‘sincerly’ on the envelope.”
He gave Tyler Simms his two hundred dollars, plus fifty extra.
He gave Grandma back everything. Fifty-six hundred dollars, in a cashier’s check from the Bank of Cedar Ridge. She put it in her savings account and didn’t touch it.
He also gave me back the thirteen hundred and twelve dollars I’d paid for the taxes. I tried not to take it. He wouldn’t let me.
“You’re not paying for my mess,” he said. “You’ve done enough.”
The next Saturday, I was due to leave. My leave was almost over. I had to report back to Camp Lejeune by Monday morning.
I got up at five-thirty. Grandma was already up, frying eggs. Over easy.
At six-thirty, I heard a truck in the driveway. Not a big diesel. A small, rattling four-cylinder. The Ranger.
Ray climbed out. He was wearing old jeans with grass stains on the knees and a T-shirt from a church fish fry in 2014. He walked around to the back of the house and stood in front of the shed.
I went out to meet him with my coffee.
“I don’t remember how to do it right,” he said. He didn’t look at me. “Your grandpa showed me when I was ten. But I was mad about it. I didn’t pay attention.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
I pulled out the mower. I showed him how to check the oil, and pull the plug wire, and check the blade. I showed him the air filter. I showed him where Grandpa’s tools hung on the pegboard, outlined in black marker.
Then I took him out to the front yard. To the long side, by the fence.
“You go down the long way first,” I said. “Fence to fence. Then you come back and overlap by about the width of your hand. Line up the edge of the wheel with the line you just made.”
He nodded.
“And keep your eyes on the end,” I said. “Not on your feet. Your feet’ll follow your eyes.”
His first line was crooked as a snake.
He shut off the mower and looked at it. He swore under his breath.
“Again,” Grandma called from the porch.
She was sitting in her broken lawn chair at the top of the steps, in her blue housecoat. Her hands were folded in her lap.
Ray looked up at her. He almost smiled.
He started the mower again. His second line was a little better.
“Again,” Grandma said.
It took him an hour and a half to do Grandma’s yard. It took me forty-five minutes the Saturday before. But when he was done, it had stripes. Not perfect ones. A little wobbly near the redbud tree. But stripes.
He was soaked with sweat. He shut off the mower and stood in the middle of the yard, breathing hard, looking at it.
Grandma stood up. She came to the top of the porch steps.
She looked at the yard for a long time.
Then she nodded. Once.
Ray had to turn away and pretend there was something wrong with the mower for a minute.
Then he rolled it next door. To Miss Edna’s.
She was sitting on her porch in her straight-backed chair, snapping green beans. She watched him come up her driveway.
“Raymond Gaines,” she said. “Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You going to watch Herbert’s roses?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went back to snapping her beans. Ray started the mower.
I left at noon.
I had a twelve-hour drive to Camp Lejeune. My seabag was in the back of the rented Corolla. I’d washed everything and folded it, and Grandma had packed me a cooler with fried chicken, biscuits, and a mason jar of sweet tea from Loretta.
Grandma walked me out to the car. She held onto my arm going down the porch steps.
At the bottom, she stopped. She looked down Locust Street.
Ray was halfway down the block, at Mrs. Banks’s. Pushing Grandpa’s red Snapper. His shirt was soaked through. Tyler Simms was behind him with Grandpa’s rake, and I could hear Ray telling him something, and Tyler laughing.
Under the big oak tree, the ladies had set up their folding chairs again. Loretta was pouring tea.
“Look at that,” Grandma said quietly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Walt would’ve liked to see that.” She squeezed my arm. “And Danny.”
She turned to me. She reached up and put both hands on my face, the way she did when I was eleven.
“You didn’t make a war over grass,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
“You just cut it.” She patted my cheek. “That’s what your daddy would’ve done. Just cut it. Let everybody else figure out what it meant.”
She hugged me hard. She smelled like bacon grease and Jergens lotion. Ninety pounds, holding on like a steel trap.
“Come home safe,” she said into my shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter Twelve: The Register
I got a letter from her in October.
I was back at Camp Lejeune, in the barracks, doing a field day with my squad. Scrubbing floors, the way the Marines do every Thursday night whether they need it or not. The mail clerk came through and dropped an envelope on my rack.
Grandma’s handwriting. Slanted blue cursive. Three pages, front and back, like always.
She told me about the church potluck. Mrs. Halloway brought a Jell-O salad nobody would eat. She told me about her blood pressure. The doctor said it was the best it had been in five years.
She told me Ray got a job. A real one. Driving a delivery route for a feed store in Rolla. Thirty-eight thousand a year. Not what he made at the plant, but steady. He and Sheila were seeing a counselor at the church. Sheila had made him cut up every credit card he had, in front of her, at the kitchen table.
She told me Locust Street had won Yard of the Month from the Cedar Ridge Garden Club. The whole street. Not one house. They’d never given it to a whole street before. The garden club ladies came and put a little wooden sign in Miss Edna’s front yard, since hers was in the middle.
She told me Ray had cut every yard on Locust Street every Saturday since I left. Twelve Saturdays in a row. He hadn’t missed one, not even the Saturday it rained, when he waited in the Ranger until it stopped and then did it anyway.
“His lines are getting straighter,” she wrote. “Not as good as yours. But straighter.”
At the end of the letter, there was a photograph. One of those old-fashioned prints from the Walmart photo counter.
It was Locust Street. Taken from Grandma’s porch. All ten yards, in the late afternoon sun. Every one of them striped dark and light, all the way down to the dead end. The ladies were in their folding chairs under the big oak tree. Ray was standing at the curb in a sweaty T-shirt, leaning on Grandpa’s red Snapper, squinting into the camera.
He wasn’t smiling. Not exactly. But he wasn’t not smiling either.
On the back, in Grandma’s slanted blue cursive, she’d written: Taken by Tyler. Saturday, Sept. 27.
There was one more thing in the envelope.
A single page. Torn carefully out of a checkbook register, along the perforation. I recognized it right away. The same lined paper. The same columns. The same blue ink.
The September page.
I unfolded it on my rack.
Ameren Missouri, 81. Cedar Ridge Water, 29. Walmart pharmacy, 12. Church offering, 20. Church offering, 20. Church offering, 20. Church offering, 20.
And then, near the bottom of the page, in the column where the deposits go, in her slanted cursive:
Ray. 400.
Next to it, in pencil, in small letters, she’d written: returned. lawn’s free now.
And under that, in different ink, darker, like she’d gone back and added it later:
Straight lines.
I sat on my rack for a long time holding that page.
All around me, my squad was scrubbing the floor and arguing about whose turn it was to do the head. Somebody had a radio going. Somebody was complaining about the chow hall.
I thought about the night I came home in July. Sitting at Grandma’s kitchen table at midnight with a glass of milk, looking at Ray. 400, Ray. 400, Ray. 400, eleven times in a row, with my stomach in a knot.
I thought about what I could have done. I could have yelled. I could have driven to Ray’s house that same night and dragged him out of bed. I could have called a lawyer, or the sheriff, or the newspaper. I could have made a war of it.
Grandma would’ve let me, too. She would’ve sat in her chair and watched me do it. And then she’d have lost her other son, and I’d have lost my uncle, and Locust Street would still be knee-high in foxtail grass.
Instead I went out to the shed and sharpened a blade.
That’s all. I sharpened a blade, and changed the oil, and cut one yard in straight lines. And then the next one. And then the next one, until there weren’t any more.
And it turned out a straight line is a pretty loud thing to say, if you say it ten times in a row in front of everybody.
I folded the register page back up along its creases. I put it in the photograph’s envelope with the picture of Locust Street.
Then I tucked the whole thing inside my cover, the way Marines carry things they don’t want to lose. Up inside the crown of the hat, against the top of my head.
It’s still there. I carry it every day.
A picture of ten yards in a Missouri summer, striped dark and light, all the way down a dead-end street.
And one line in my grandmother’s checkbook, in slanted blue ink, in the column where the money comes back.
