The Sneakers That Brought Him Home
Why He Left
I want to tell you honestly what those six years had done to me, because I think it matters to understanding what happened next, and because I do not believe in dressing up grief to make it prettier than it was.
When my husband died, Bruce disappeared within three weeks, and for a long time I believed the worst kind of things a person can believe about someone they loved. I believed he simply could not be bothered with a grieving widow and a fatherless eight year old once the funeral casseroles stopped coming. I believed, on my worse nights, that he had never really cared the way I thought he had, that the whole friendship had been convenient rather than real, and that convenience had run out the second it started costing him something.
What I did not know, and what he told me plainly that morning in the principal’s office with his hat still turning over in his hands, was that Bruce had been the one who convinced my husband to take the job at the equipment yard in the first place, six months before the accident, over a job my husband had been offered doing something safer, something Bruce had talked him out of because the equipment yard paid forty cents an hour more and Bruce wanted his best friend working alongside him.
“I’ve spent six years believing that was on me,” Bruce said, and his voice cracked in a way I had never once heard it crack in the twenty some years I had known him. “I couldn’t sit in that church and sing hymns next to you and that little girl knowing I was the reason he took that job. I couldn’t do it. So I left instead of doing the harder thing, which was staying and letting you be angry at me for as long as you needed to be.”
He had gone to Kentucky, taken construction work, and slid, over that first year, into drinking the kind of hours away that a grieving, guilty man slides into when nobody around him knows enough to catch him at it. It cost him his marriage to Chad’s mother, who left partway through, unable to carry the weight of a man determined to punish himself for something that was never fully his to carry in the first place. It cost him two more years before he found his way, through a program at a little country church outside Lexington, to finally getting sober and finally getting honest with himself about the difference between loving someone and being able to save them from a decision that was never entirely his to make.
“I’ve been sober twenty three months,” he told the principal, and then, looking straight at me, “I moved my mother closer to steady work about six months back so Chad could have some stability while I finished proving to myself I was fit to be trusted with him full time again. I’ve been forty minutes from this town for half a year, Debbie, and I have driven past the exit for here more times than I can count, and I never once had the nerve to take it.”