I had told her I couldn’t wait to mow the yard, because I had missed that sound, and the smell, and her bringing me tea.
I had forgotten I wrote that. She hadn’t. She had underlined it in pencil.
“When I read that,” she said, “I almost told you about Ricky. I sat in this chair with my pen. But I didn’t want you worrying over there. You had enough to worry about.”
I put the letter back in the tin and set the tin on the table, very carefully, and then I put my head down on her knees the way I did when I was eleven years old and my daddy had just died. She put her hand on my hair.
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“There’s my boy,” she said. “There’s my boy.”
We sat like that a long time. The clock in the hall ticked. The sprinkler went somewhere down the block.
Neither of us said anything else, because there was nothing else that needed saying.
On Thursday, Grandma went to the beauty shop on Main. I drove her.
She came out with her curls set and sprayed and smelling like the 1970s, and she looked ten years younger, and she knew it.
That same afternoon, when we got back, my uncle’s white pickup was parked in front of the house.
No trailer this time. He was sitting on the porch steps waiting for us, in a clean shirt.
He stood up when we pulled in. He came around to Grandma’s side of the car and opened the door for her and helped her out by the elbow, careful of her hip. I hadn’t seen him do that in a long time.
He handed her a white bank envelope. “That’s four hundred, Mom,” he said. “In cash. That’s the first one. I sold the Buick.”
She opened it and counted it right there, twenty-dollar bills, because she is who she is. Then she folded the flap down and held it against her chest.
“I’ll bring the rest,” he said. “It’ll take me a while. But you’ll get every dollar of it. A hundred a month, at least, until it’s square. You can write it down in the book.”
“I’ll write it down,” she said.
Then he turned to me. He held out his hand, and I shook it.
His grip was the same as my dad’s had been. I had forgotten that, or maybe I had never noticed it before.
“I’m sorry, Tyler,” he said. “You came home to that. That’s on me. All of it.”
“It’s all right, Uncle Rick,” I said. “It’s not all right. But it’s going to be.”
He nodded like that was fair. Then he said something I didn’t expect. “When you go back, I’ll cut it. Saturdays. For free. If she’ll have me.”