The Marine Who Mowed Elm Street

I put the checkbook back exactly where it was, open to the same page, with the pen in the fold.

Then I went out on the back step and sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the crickets.

I thought about calling him right then. It was nearly midnight, and I had his number in my phone, and I could feel exactly how the call would go.

I would say something I could not take back, and he would say something worse, and Grandma would wake up to her son and her grandson shouting at each other over her checkbook.

So I did the only thing I have ever known to do when I am that angry.

I sat on her back step and prayed, badly, mostly just asking to keep my mouth shut until morning.

My grandmother raised me from the time I was eleven. My dad was her younger son, Danny, and he died on a county road east of town in a pickup accident the winter I was in fifth grade. My mother had been gone a long while by then.

So it was Grandma and Grandpa and me in the white frame house on Elm Street, with the porch swing and the big elm out front that the street is named for, or at least that is what Grandpa always told me.

Grandpa passed in 2019, while I was still in high school. He had mowed that yard every Saturday morning of his adult life with the same red push mower, and when he got too weak, I took it over. I was proud to.

When I left for boot camp, Grandma cried at the bus station in Salina and then told me to stand up straight.

When I left for deployment, she held my face in both hands and said she would pray for me every night, and she did.

My uncle Rick is her older son. He is fifty. He sells used cars part time off a gravel lot out by the highway, and he has been divorced for about ten years. He was never mean to me growing up, only busy.

He was the one who drove Grandma to her appointments while I was gone. I had been grateful for that.

I had even written him a letter from overseas to say thank you, which sat in my stomach like a stone now.

I did not sleep much. Seven months of waking up at five will do that to you even without a checkbook on your mind.

At half past five, I was dressed in my gray PT shorts and an olive-green T-shirt, drinking her store-brand coffee.