The Lunch My Son Shared

The Long Road Riders adopted us, is the only way I can put it. They came back through town on a Saturday and did a fundraiser ride, and they raised money for the elementary school’s lunch program, so that no child in Millbrook ever sits at that school hungry, ever, and they did it in Danny’s name and in Eli’s name both, and Dot fed them all again and this time let the quilting ladies help her, and the whole town turned out. Pastor Wells said a few words. My father would have liked it. He always said the measure of a town is how it treats the ones who are hurting, and I stood there in the church parking lot watching my whole town love on two hundred strangers, and I thought, we passed, Daddy. We passed.

Eli did not really understand, at first, what the fuss was about. He kept asking me why everybody kept saying he did something special. “I just shared my lunch,” he said, exasperated, the way only an eight-year-old can be. “You’re supposed to share.” And I did not have the heart to explain to him that the whole entire trouble with the grown-up world is that we know we are supposed to and we do not do it anyway. That somewhere between his age and ours we learn to keep our sandwiches to ourselves. That we walk past the sad man by the fence every single day and tell ourselves it is not our business, it is not our place, we would not know what to say. I did not explain any of that. I just kissed the top of his head and told him that yes, that is exactly right, you are supposed to share, and I am proud of you for remembering when the rest of us forget.

The last thing Roy gave us

There is one more thing I have to tell, and then I will let this story rest.

Last Thursday, Roy came for supper as he does, and after we ate he asked if he could give Eli something, and he pulled out that little sack from the hardware store again, and inside it was the die-cast motorcycle. Danny’s motorcycle. The one Eli had handed back to him three weeks before.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Roy told my son. “About keeping Danny’s, so I remember him big. And you were right, that’s the important one, and I’m going to keep it right where it’s been on my dresser for thirty years.” He reached into the sack again. “But I got you your own.”

And he pulled out a second little motorcycle, brand new, still shining, red and chrome, and beside it a second one just like it. Two of them.

“This one’s yours,” he said, pressing the first into Eli’s hands. “So you remember me. And this one,” he held up the second, “this one I’m keeping in my pocket, next to Danny’s on the dresser at night. So an old man who spent thirty years thinking he had nobody left to love can remember that a boy in dinosaur pajamas shared his lunch with him and gave him back his whole family.” He looked around my kitchen, at Ray, at me, at the roast pan in the sink and the school papers on the fridge and the ordinary held-together clutter of an ordinary house. “All of you,” he said. “You gave an old man back a whole family.”