Grandma came out at six in her flowered housedress and her old cardigan, with her white curls still flat on one side from the pillow. She saw me and put both hands over her mouth.
I got up and hugged her, careful of her hip, and she hung on to me a long time.
She smelled like Jergens lotion and the lilac powder she has used forever. She was smaller than I remembered, or I was bigger.
“You didn’t eat your chicken,” she said, because the first thing she did was open the refrigerator and check.
“No, ma’am. I’ll have it for lunch.” I pulled out her chair for her.
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“Grandma, I need to ask you about something, and I need you not to be upset with me for asking.”
She saw the checkbook. I watched her face change. She did not look guilty. She looked tired, which was worse.
“Ricky’s been taking care of the yard,” she said. “With my hip the way it is, I can’t be out there anymore. He said that’s what the yard outfits in Salina charge, four hundred a month.”
“Grandma, the Kessler boy down the street would cut it for twenty dollars a week. And there’s no grass in February.”
“He raked in March,” she said. “And he cleaned out the gutters once. He’s been having a hard time with the lot, Tyler. Nobody’s buying. He said he’d make it up to me when things turned around.”
I told her I could call Rick right then. I told her I could drive out to the lot.
I could talk to the pastor, or to the lady at the bank who had known her for forty years.
She put her hand flat on the table, the way she used to when I was fourteen and about to argue with her about curfew.
“He is my son,” she said. “I wrote those checks with my own hand, and I knew what I was doing when I wrote them. This is family business. I will not have it all over town, and I will not have you two fighting in a parking lot. Promise me.”
That was the thing about my grandmother. She would rather go without her hair appointment for eight months than embarrass her boy in front of anyone. I understood it, even if I hated it.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I won’t call anybody. And I won’t go to the lot.”
She looked at me a long moment, because she knows me. “What are you going to do, then?”
“I’m going to mow your yard,” I said.
The red push mower was in the shed where Grandpa always kept it, behind the bags of potting soil and the old Radio Flyer wagon I learned to pull my first loads of firewood in. There was a coffee can of rags on the shelf beside it.