My mother did not wait for me to ask. When I came back into the church, she was sitting alone in the front pew with the rosary in her lap, and she patted the wood beside her without looking up. I sat. The organist had stopped. The last of the mourners had gone down to the hall for the sandwiches. She said, in a voice I had to lean toward to hear, “Stevie, I was married before your father. I never told you. I should have told you when you were twelve.”
Her first husband, she said, was Raymond Dunn. She married him at eighteen, in 1966, because he was handsome and because her father was glad to see her go. By the end of the first year he had broken her nose. By the end of the second, her arm. She left him in the spring of 1969 with one suitcase, on a bus out of Racine, and sat on a bench in Kenosha for six hours with nowhere to go. A young toolmaker with a lunch pail sat down beside her and asked if she was hungry.
She and my father married in 1970. She did not tell anyone about Raymond, not her priest, not her children. She thought it would die with her. Then, in 1990, she saw the name in the Kenosha paper: Raymond Dunn had married a young woman, Linda, and bought the yellow house on Cherry Street, six blocks from our kitchen. She knew that was no accident. She stood at the sink with the newspaper in her hand until the water ran cold.
A man who mows the lawn of a stranger for thirty one years is saying, without a word, that she is not alone.
“He did not leave Kenosha for good,” she said. “After 1994 he moved to Waukegan, thirty minutes south, and every Saturday for twenty six years he drove up and went down Cherry Street, slowly, in that gray Buick, to see whether she was alone. And every Saturday your father was in her yard, with the mower, looking straight at him. I begged your father to stop. I was afraid, Stevie. I was afraid that Raymond would come for him. I slammed the cupboards because it was the only way I knew to say it.”
Her fear, she explained, had a second layer, harder to say. She had stayed silent for fifty years because she was ashamed that she had not warned Linda. In 1990, when Raymond married her, my mother had known his nature and had done nothing. She had told herself it was not her place. She had told herself it was another life. And when the young woman ran into the street in 1994 with blood on her gown, my mother understood what her silence had cost.
Mrs. Dunn had come back into the church while my mother was speaking. She stood in the aisle with her purse in both hands, very small and straight, and neither woman said anything for what seemed like a full minute. Then my mother stood. She is seventy eight, with arthritis in both knees, and it took her some time. She walked to the aisle and said, in a cracked voice, “Linda, I am sorry. I should have told you. I knew what he was.”
Mrs. Dunn did not answer. She put down her purse on the pew. She stepped forward and put her arms around my mother, and my mother put her arms around her, and the two of them stood in the aisle of St. Casimir with the candles flickering, holding each other like women pulled out of the same river. I looked up at the ceiling. I am a football coach. I am not accustomed to weeping in church. I wept anyway.
Raymond Dunn, I learned that week, had died in a nursing home in Waukegan in the spring of 2020, after a stroke. My father had read the obituary in the paper. He said nothing about it to anyone. He went on mowing the yard on Cherry Street every Saturday for six more years because, as Mrs. Dunn explained to me later in her kitchen, she had not been able to believe that Raymond was gone until she saw a man in the yard each week, who was alive and kind and looking back.
She invited us to the yellow house the next Saturday. It was the first time my mother had been through that gate, the first time Mrs. Dunn had asked anyone in for thirty one years. I mowed. It took me forty minutes, and the grass was thin and brown at the edges where my father had missed. When I came up the walk, the front door opened, and Linda Dunn came out on the porch, in the sun, with a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses, and sat down on the step.
I mow that lawn on Saturdays now. My mother sits on the porch with Linda and a pot of tea, and they talk about nothing, and they laugh more than two old women should. Sometimes a neighbor walks by and waves. The curtains in the front window are open. And on the wall above the old red mower in my garage hangs a single blade of cut grass, pressed flat in a small frame, which my father would have called a foolish thing to keep, and which I will keep forever.
