The Marine Who Mowed Elm Street

Then he walked up the steps, slow, and sat down on the top one, with his back to the street.

He put his face in his hands. He is fifty years old and I had never seen him do that.

“The lot’s behind,” he said, to the porch boards. “Way behind. The bank’s been on me since Christmas about the floor plan. I’ve got six cars I can’t move and payments on all of them.”

“You could have told me,” Grandma said.

“I did tell you, Mom. Sort of.” He rubbed his face. “I told myself you’d want to help. I told myself the yard was real work some weeks, and it was, some weeks. I raked. I did the gutters. I told myself a lot of things.”

“In February, Ricky,” Grandma said. Not unkind. Just plain.

He didn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer for it.

“I kept meaning to stop,” he said after a while. “Every month I’d say, this is the last one. Then the first would come around and the bank would call, and she’d have the check written before I even asked.”

Grandma looked down at him on the step. “I wrote it because you’re mine,” she said. “Not because it was right. I knew it wasn’t right in February.”

I came up the walk and stood at the bottom of the steps.

I had been thinking all morning about what I would say to him if I got the chance, and in the end, I only said one thing.

“She hasn’t been to the beauty shop since January, Uncle Rick,” I said. “And there’s no hamburger in the freezer.”

He looked up at me. Then he looked over at his mother in her housedress, with her flattened curls and her old cardigan in that heat, and I watched it land on him.

He stood up. He went to the truck. For a second, I thought he was going to drive away, and maybe part of him wanted to.

Instead he came back with his wallet, opened it, and looked inside it, and closed it again.

“I don’t have it on me,” he said. “I’ll get it. I promise you, Mom, I’ll get it.”

“Don’t promise me, Ricky,” she said. “Just get it.”

Mrs. Fisher came down her porch steps with the pitcher and a glass, crossed the side yard I’d cut that morning, and handed the glass to me. Then she poured another one and held it out to Rick.

He looked at it. She kept holding it out. She is eighty-six and she has outlasted a husband, two dogs and three pastors, and she can hold a glass of tea out longer than anybody alive.

He took it. “Thank you, Mrs. Fisher,” he said.

“You’re welcome, Richard,” she said. “Your daddy would have been sick about this. But he would have wanted you to have the tea.”