The checkbook was lying open on Grandma’s kitchen table under the little light over the sink, the way she always left it after she paid her bills on the first of the month.
I was not snooping. I had come in at a quarter past eleven on a Friday night after two flights and a long ride up from Wichita, and I was only looking for a pen to leave her a note.
She had gone to bed at nine, like always. The porch light was on for me, and a plate of fried chicken sat on the stove under foil, with a strip of masking tape on top that said Tyler in her careful cursive.
I was twenty-two years old and a lance corporal in the United States Marine Corps, just back from a seven-month deployment, with ten days of leave in front of me.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
I had been dreaming about that kitchen for most of those seven months.
The pen was in the checkbook, so I picked the checkbook up. Grandma still writes paper checks with carbon copies underneath, and she keeps the register in pencil, every line, every penny, the way she has since 1966.
I saw the first one because her handwriting is bigger than it used to be. February 1. Ricky. Yard. Four hundred dollars.
I turned back a page and then forward. March 1, Ricky, yard, $400. April 1, the same. May, June, July, August.
Seven checks to my uncle, all for the same thing, all for the same amount, in the same shaking pencil.
Two thousand eight hundred dollars. I did the math three times standing there in my socks, because I could not make myself believe it the first two times.
My grandmother’s Social Security comes to $1,300 a month. I know because I helped her with the direct deposit forms at the bank before I left.
That is all she has, besides the house and a small burial policy.
Four hundred dollars was almost a third of it. Every month. For a yard you could cut in forty minutes with a push mower, and in February, when the yard was frozen brown under two inches of snow.
I sat down at the table. After a while I got up and put the chicken in the refrigerator, foil and tape and all. I could not have eaten a bite of it.
On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry, was her hair appointment card from the beauty shop on Main.
She has gone every other Thursday for as long as I have been alive. The last date written on it was in January.
In the cabinet where she keeps the good coffee, there was only the store brand.
In the freezer, where there are always two pounds of hamburger from the locker plant, there was a bag of frozen peas and nothing else.