The Boy Nobody Else Would Keep

I wish I could tell you the church folded him in. Most of them did. Most of them were kind in the automatic country way, the handshakes, the you must be Micah, the plate of something sent home. But I saw the other thing too. I saw the women lean their heads together. I saw Brother Elam’s wife watch him the whole service like he might pocket the offering. I saw how fast the word had done its work on people who called themselves Christians, and I drove home that day angrier than I had been in years, at my own church, at my own sister, at a whole town that had looked at a boy’s bad luck and decided it was his character.

Micah had seen it too. He did not say a word about it. But that was the night he asked me, careful, if it was causing me trouble, him being there. If people were talking. If it would be easier if he was not around.

He was sixteen years old and he was offering to disappear so I would not be embarrassed.

“Micah,” I said. “Look at me.” He did, which was still rare. “I don’t care what this whole town says. I have never cared less about a thing in my life. You are not trouble to me. Do you hear me? You are not trouble.”

He nodded. But I could see he filed it away as a thing people say. He had been told he was wanted before. Eleven times somebody had meant it, or thought they meant it, and eleven times it had turned out to have a limit. Words were cheap where he came from. Words were what people gave you right before the car ride back.

The hardest night came in the summer.

Darlene finally agreed to come to supper. I had been working on her for months, and I think she came mostly to be able to say she had tried. I cooked all day. I told Micah my sister was coming and that she could be sharp but that it did not mean anything, and he just nodded and set the table, and he set it perfect, the forks right, the napkins folded, like a boy auditioning for a part.

Darlene came. She was polite the way a closed door is polite. She looked at him and she said, well, aren’t you tall, and that was about the warmest thing she managed. Through supper she asked him questions that were not really questions. Where are your people from. Oh, you don’t know. How many homes was it again. And Micah answered every one of them in that small flat voice, eleven, ma’am, I don’t know, ma’am, no, ma’am, I never finished a full year anywhere, and I sat there watching my sister reduce six months of my work to rubble with a dinner fork.

Then, after, while I was cutting the pie, she did the thing I will never fully forgive. My mother’s silver had come to me when Mama passed, a set of spoons in a felt box in the sideboard. Darlene got up, under the excuse of looking for a serving piece, and she opened that sideboard and she counted the spoons. Right there. With him in the room. She counted my mother’s spoons and then she looked at Micah while she did it, so he would know exactly what she was counting and exactly what she thought he was.

He saw. Of course he saw. He had spent his whole life learning to read a room for the exact moment somebody decided he was a thief.