We pulled into our driveway, and Marie got out to open the garage door. The Walkers had switched on their lampposts across the road; under their light I could see our yard’s overgrown grass, knee-high and gone to seed. Things felt wrong. The house, the uncut grass, Ellen on the road, Dad gone. A few months earlier Mr. Walker had written a note, a barely disguised complaint about how the house looked. The card read “Thinking of You” on the front, and inside he’d sympathized with all we had been through in the past year, how we’d been on his mind. He said he and his wife Minnie had been praying for us, and then he ended the note, “We were thinking that it might help alleviate your burden if you had someone to cut your lawn this summer and do odd jobs for you. I know one of the De Martino boys is looking for that line of summer work. Let us know if we can be of any help.” He signed it “Your neighbor and friend, Harry Walker.”

Marie had threatened to march over there. “I am going to ask him, if he’s such a big Christian and so worried about the length of our grass, why doesn’t he drive over here in his Cadillac sit-down lawn mower and sit his fat Elmer Fudd butt down on its real leather seat and cut it for us?”