The Street I Mowed the Day I Got Home

The checkbook was sitting on the kitchen table when I got in Friday night, and I was not even looking for it. I was looking for a glass and the ice bucket.

It was July in Missouri and the drive up from the airport in Springfield had left my shirt stuck to my back. Grandma Lou had gone to bed at eight like she always did.

The light over the stove was on for me, the way it had been on for me my whole life.

I poured the tea and I sat down at the table and there it was. Her ledger. The little blue checkbook with the carbon pages she had used since before I was born.

She wrote everything down. Groceries, the water bill, the offering at church, all of it in her slow careful hand.

I was not snooping. I just turned it to look at the date, to see what day she thought it was. Old folks lose track, and I had been gone seven months.

The last page was full of the same entry, over and over. Ray. 400. Ray. 400. Ray. 400.

I counted back. It went the whole time I was deployed. Every month, the first week of the month, four hundred dollars to Ray.

My uncle. Her son.

Seven months I had been gone, mostly on a little base you will not find on a map, where the mail came when it came and a phone call home cost a small fortune in minutes.

She never once told me. Every time I got her on the line she said the same thing, that everything was fine and I should mind my own self and keep my head down.

I believed her, because you want to believe her. You are ten thousand miles away and you need the one place you came from to be the one place that stays the same.

I set the tea down and I did not drink it. I sat there in the kitchen I grew up in and I read that column until the numbers stopped meaning anything. Then I read it again until they did.