He said, “It’s my mother. I’ve been taking it back off her.” The second party added at my address in September was his mother, my neighbor’s daughter, who moved back into that house after a bad year and who had been using my mail to open two credit cards and a store account in my name. She’d filed the form herself. The grandson found out in November when a statement came to their kitchen, and instead of telling anyone he started intercepting the mail — coming down before I got up, pulling anything with my name on it, and putting the legitimate pieces back in my box after he’d sorted them. The stack in the truck was mine, opened, because he was checking it.
The mowing was penance. That’s what he told me in the driveway, nineteen years old, holding the handle of a mower and crying in a way I have not seen a young man cry. He’d been protecting two people at once and doing a bad job of both, and he’d talked himself into believing that if he could stop the damage before I noticed it, nobody would have to know his mother was a thief. Eleven months of that. He mowed a widow’s lawn every Saturday for eleven months rather than knock on the door and say a true sentence.
I filed the report on a Tuesday and it was the hardest thing I’ve done since the funeral. Fourteen thousand dollars. She took a plea in the spring — restitution and probation — and my neighbor hasn’t spoken to me since, which I’d have expected and which still stings after twenty-two years of Christmas cards. The grandson is at community college now. He came by in September, at the anniversary, and asked if he could still do the lawn, and I told him no — I told him he could come in and eat something and then go be nineteen. He does the lawn anyway. I’ve stopped arguing about it.
