The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

I felt for him. My mother raised me to notice the person standing at the edge of the room, and Curtis was always at the edge of the room. So I started eating my lunch with him sometimes, sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the shade of the loading dock, talking about nothing, about the weather and the price of corn and whether the Cardinals had a bullpen this year.

He told me a little about himself over those weeks. He had grown up in southern Missouri, down in the hills near the Arkansas line. He had knocked around a lot of yards and warehouses since then. He did not talk about family. When I mentioned mine, he would nod and go quiet, and I learned not to push.

About a week before the Fourth, I asked him what his plans were for the holiday.

He shrugged and said he figured he would stay home. He did not know anybody yet, he said, and a man does not want to invite himself.

I did not even think about it. I just said, “Well, you are not spending the Fourth alone in the Pruitt place. Come out to ours. Nora cooks enough for the whole county. Bring nothing but your appetite.”

He looked at me for a second like I had said something in another language. Then something loosened in his face and he thanked me, and thanked me again, and thanked me a third time when I dropped him off at his truck that evening. I remember thinking, this is a lonely man, and it does not cost me a thing to make him a little less lonely.

I have thought about that a lot since. About how the smallest kindness can pull the pin on something you did not know was buried in your own backyard.

The party

The Fourth came in hot and blue and perfect.

By one o’clock the yard was full. My cousin Denny had the horseshoes going. The Hollis kids and the Prewitt kids were running through the sprinkler. My mother was on the glider under the hackberry with her sister, both of them fanning themselves and running down everyone who walked by, which is their favorite hobby. Pastor Kettle from the Methodist church was there eating potato salad and pretending he was not going to have seconds. The VFW guys had claimed the picnic table nearest the cooler, as is their right.

I was at the grill with a spatula in one hand and a cold can of pop in the other, sweating through my shirt and happy as a man can be. Nora moved through the whole thing like she was conducting it. Every time I looked up she was somewhere new. She caught my eye once across the yard and gave me the little private smile she has given me across crowded rooms for thirteen years, and I thought, not for the first time, that I would not trade my life for any other life on earth.

Curtis got there late.

Everyone else had come at noon, but it was closer to two when I saw his truck pull up on the gravel by the gate. I waved my spatula and hollered for him to come on in. He walked up a little stiff, holding a store-bought pie he had brought even though I told him not to bring anything, and I could see him deciding whether he was welcome. I met him at the gate, took the pie, clapped him on the shoulder, and steered him toward the cooler. I introduced him to Denny and the VFW guys. I got a cold drink into his hand. He started to relax. I watched it happen, the shoulders coming down, the smallest smile. I felt like a good man doing a good thing.

Then Nora came out onto the patio carrying a big aluminum tray of burgers fresh off my second batch, calling out that the food was ready, and everything I understood about my life came apart in the space of about four seconds.