The Day I Trusted My Granddaughter’s Fear
My Husband’s Face
We pulled up to the house just as the sky was starting to go the particular shade of orange it turns over Bradley County in late spring, the kind of light that makes even an ordinary front porch look like something out of a photograph. Lane was already outside, the way he usually is toward evening, sitting in the porch rocker with a glass of tea and the dog stretched out at his feet.
He stood up when he saw the cab, and I watched his eyes go past me, past Heather, straight to the empty spot in our driveway where Marty’s sedan should have been.
I have been married to Lane for forty-one years. I know the shape of every expression that man’s face is capable of making. I know his tired face and his proud face and the face he makes when the Vols lose a game he’d bet a little too much confidence on. What crossed his face when he saw that empty driveway was none of those. It was older than any of those. It looked, more than anything, like the face of a man who has spent years waiting for a piece of news he hoped would never come, and has just been told it’s finally here.
“Where’s the car,” he said, and it was not really a question. It came out flat, already braced for the answer.
I told him everything, right there on the porch, with Heather pressed against my leg and the dog sniffing curiously at the taxi pulling away behind us. I told him about the stillness that had come over her in the back seat. About the lady she said had been crying there. About the please that hadn’t sounded like a child being difficult.
Lane did not ask if I was sure I’d heard her right. He did not say what most grown men his age would have said, that children make things up, that eight-year-olds have wild imaginations and shouldn’t be indulged. He crouched down instead, right there on the porch, until he was eye level with his granddaughter, and looked at her the way you look at someone you are trying to recognize from a long way off.
Then he looked up at my purse, at the outline of the spare key sitting inside it, and something moved behind his eyes that I had only seen twice before in forty-one years of marriage. Both other times, someone had died.
“Lane,” I said. “You’re scaring me. What is it.”
That’s when my phone buzzed in my hand.
Marty’s name lit up the screen.
Neither one of us reached for it right away.