The Marine Who Mowed Elm Street

Then she went back to her porch. That was the only thing anybody on Elm Street ever said to my uncle about it, as far as I know. It was enough.

Rick drank the tea standing in the yard. He didn’t stay for a sandwich.

He tied the riding mower back down that he had never unstrapped, and he drove up Elm Street slow, past every yard.

Grandma sat back down. Her hands were trembling a little, so I took the glass off the rail and held it for her until they stopped.

“I didn’t like doing that,” she said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“He’s a good boy, underneath. He was always the one who worried.” She took the glass from me. “You didn’t gloat. I was watching. I’m proud of you for that.”

The next morning we went to church at First Methodist, where she has sat in the fourth pew on the left since before I was born.

Half of Elm Street was there. Nobody said a word about Saturday, but Mr. Ortman shook my hand twice.

We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” which was Grandpa’s favorite, and Grandma held the hymnal low so I could see it, though we both knew all the words. Her voice is thin now, but it is still on the note.

Rick wasn’t there. He hadn’t been much since the divorce. Nobody said anything about that, either.

That afternoon, after the fried chicken, which I finally ate, cold, and which was the best thing I had eaten in seven months, Grandma said she wanted to show me something. She went to her chair in the front room.

Beside her chair, on the little table with the lamp and her reading glasses and her Bible, there was a blue Danish butter cookie tin.

The kind every grandmother in America has, the kind that never has cookies in it.

She handed it to me. “Open it,” she said.

It was full of my letters. Every one I had written her from deployment, in order, the envelopes slit neatly along the top with her letter opener.

There were thirty-one of them. I wrote her every Sunday, and a few times in between.

The envelopes on the bottom were soft as cloth. The corners had gone round.

She had read them so many times the folds had started to split, and she had mended two of them on the back with Scotch tape.

“I read one every night before I say my prayers,” she said. “I start at the beginning when I get to the end. I’ve been through them, oh, six or seven times now.”

I took out the top one. It was the one I wrote her in August, when we were getting close to coming home.