Part 2

A white pickup pulled in behind it. Chad got out of the pickup. He's forty-six, tan, in a golf shirt and sunglasses, holding a folder. Two men in work clothes got out of the crane truck with shovels. My grandmother set down her coffee. "Chad," she said. "What's all this?" He walked up the steps and taped a piece of paper to her front door. NOTICE OF INTENT TO FORECLOSE, it said, in big black letters. "Mrs. Kimbrough, you've been fined fifty dollars a day since June for an unapproved structure on your lot," he said. "That pole. With legal fees, you owe the association eleven thousand and fifty dollars. Today we're removing the structure. If the balance isn't paid, the association will take the house." My grandmother stood up. She's about five feet tall. She held on to the porch rail. "That pole was here before your association was a gleam in anybody's eye, Chad," she said. "My husband put it up." That's when he said it. Loud enough for every driveway on the street. "It's a rag on a pole, Mrs. Kimbrough. Your husband's been dead since 1968. Some of us still have property values to protect." I've never seen my grandmother cry. Not once in my whole life. Her chin started to shake. I stood up. Chad looked at my uniform, and he smiled. "And this isn't your base, Major," he said. "Out here you're just a granddaughter." He nodded to his men. They walked out to the flagpole and started digging around the base. My grandmother went down those porch steps faster than I've seen her move in ten years. She walked right out into the yard, stood in front of that pole, and took hold of the rope with both hands. She didn't say a word. She just stood there. Up and down the street, people were holding up their phones. I called the sheriff's office and told them men were digging up my grandmother's yard with no court order. They said a deputy was on the way. I was so angry my whole body felt hot. But I stood next to my grandmother and put my hand on her back, and I kept my voice calm. Officers do that. Inside, I wanted to throw Chad Sizemore through his own windshield. Then one of the workers stopped digging. "Hey, boss," he said. "There's something down here." Right next to the pole, at the edge of the old concrete, there was a round metal lid showing in the dirt. He scraped around it with his shovel. It was a coffee can. Rusted brown, pressed right into the side of the concrete footing, its lid sealed with something black and hard, like old tar. My grandmother looked down at that can for a long time. "I never knew that was there," she whispered. The sheriff's deputy pulled up fifteen minutes later. Deputy Villanueva, young, polite, with his hat in his hand when he saw my grandmother. He asked Chad if the association had a court order.