The Chair I Saved For My Son

The note said he had been sitting outside the Baptist church parking lot, three blocks from my house, since a little after two that afternoon. He said he had driven twelve hours straight up from Oklahoma without telling me, because he was not sure, until he was actually parked outside the church he had been baptized in as a boy, whether he had it in him to finish the drive those last three blocks. He said Abigail and Blake had known since the day before, that they had driven out to meet him at a gas station off the highway and had been sitting with him in that church parking lot the whole four hours I had been waiting at my own table, coaxing him those last three blocks one minute at a time, because they were not going to let him turn that truck around again after fifteen years of watching him almost come home and not quite make it. He said he had sent the deputy, a family friend from church who had gone through school with Blake, up to the house first with the note, because if I read it and did not want him in this house after everything he had said to me the week he left, he needed to know that before he let his own daughter, seven years old and asleep in his truck’s back seat right now, see her father turned away from his own mother’s door.

He signed it, simply, Brent.

The End of My Driveway

I stood there long enough that the deputy finally said, gently, “He’s parked at the end of your road, ma’am. Said he’d wait as long as it took.”

I walked down my own driveway in my house slippers, past the mailbox, past the ditch where Brent used to catch crawdads as a boy, and I could see his truck idling at the end of the road with its parking lights on, the way you leave a truck when you are not sure yet whether you are staying.

He got out before I reached him. Twenty years does something to a face, adds lines a mother has to relearn, but I would have known him blind, the way you know your own child’s shape in a doorway no matter how the years have changed the rest of him. He stood by his open truck door with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets like he was nineteen again and bracing for the argument he still half expected.

“Mama,” he said, and it was the first word, not the four written ones, that finally broke me open. “I know I don’t have the right to just show up.”