The Cave That Held My Grandfather’s Faith

She told me her name was the pastor’s wife over at the little white chapel, and that one of the church deacons had spotted a man sleeping behind the building the night before and mentioned it at breakfast, describing him close enough that she had a feeling in her stomach she could not shake. She had asked around, and a boy at the grocery store remembered a stranger asking after a Fickett woman out past the county line, and she had put two things together that most people in Harlow Springs had spent nine years refusing to put together at all.

“Your mother came to see us not long after you were sentenced,” she said, settling down onto a flat stone across from me like she had all the time in the world and no intention of using it to judge me. “She was in a state I won’t forget. She’d had to sell the house to cover what the court ordered in restitution, on top of the hospital bills from your father’s last year, and she was so ashamed of both of those things that she could not bring herself to write and tell you. She asked my husband if the church would keep half an eye out for you whenever you got released, since she did not trust herself to face you first. We’ve been watching the bus schedule for nine years, son. We just didn’t expect you’d beat us to town.”

I sat with that for a long moment, the letter still trembling in my hand, because it rearranged something I had built brick by brick in that cell, a wall with my mother’s silence on one side of it and my own shame on the other. I had spent nine years believing she had simply moved on without me. I had not once considered that she might have spent those same nine years too ashamed of what the trouble had cost her to face the son who caused it.