The Lunch My Son Shared

Roy stays for supper

Roy did not leave with the others when the sun got high and the club, one by one, thumbed their engines and rolled out. He stayed. He asked, shy as a schoolboy, if he might, and Ray shook his hand and said we would be offended if he did not, and so Roy followed us home in the late afternoon on that big rumbling bike and parked it careful at the curb and came in and sat at our kitchen table.

I made a roast. I had a chuck roast in the freezer I had been saving, and it did not seem like a day to save anything, so I thawed it and I made it with the carrots and the potatoes the way my mother taught me, and the whole house filled up with the smell of it, and Roy sat at our table and told us about Danny. The real Danny. Not the loss, the boy. How Danny had a laugh you could hear across a campground. How he was scared of the dark until he was nine and then one day just decided he was not anymore. How he loved trains, how he wanted to drive one, how he used to make Roy tell him the same story every single night about a train that got lost and found its way home.

“I never told that story again after he was gone,” Roy said, turning his fork over in his hand. “Couldn’t. But I told it last night. On the phone, before I called the club. I told it out loud to my empty kitchen, the whole thing, start to finish. First time in thirty years.” He looked at Eli, who was listening with his chin in his hands. “Your boy did that. Just so you know what a peanut butter sandwich can do.”

After supper Eli asked Roy to tell the train story, and Roy did. He told it with all the voices, and Eli laughed in all the right places, and Ray reached over under the table and took my hand and held it hard, and I thought my heart would not hold everything that was in it.

Before he left, Roy stood on our porch in the dark and looked up at the stars, which come out thick over Millbrook because there is nothing much around to drown them out, and he said, “I’ve been driving through towns like this one my whole life. Never stopping. Just passing through, looking in the lit-up windows, wondering what it’s like to belong somewhere.” He turned to me. “Would it be all right if I stopped, sometimes? If I came back?”

“Roy,” I said, “you had better.”

What came after

That was three weeks ago. I am writing this down now because I do not ever want to forget a single piece of it, and because Ray says I should, because people ought to hear it, and because my sister told me I had better tell it right before the story gets away from me and turns into something bigger and less true than it was.

So here is what is true. Roy comes to supper every Thursday now. He has taken to it like it is a solemn duty, and I suppose to him it is. He brings something every time, a bag of good coffee, a bunch of flowers from the stand out on the county road, once a whole crate of sweet corn he bought off a farmer he met at a gas station and could not resist. He and Ray have gotten to be real friends, which surprised me, my quiet husband and this loud old rider, but they sit on the porch after supper and do not say much and seem perfectly happy about it. Two men who know how to be quiet together.