The Night My Son Called 911
He ate. He watched me the whole time over the edge of the bowl. I stood at the sink and washed the pan, because that was what my hands knew how to do, and I felt his eyes on my back like a hand.
Nobody asked for ice cream.
After they were asleep I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the door shut and the fan running. That was where I did my thinking that year, because it was the only door in the trailer that locked.
I had it all worked out on the back of an envelope. Twenty-two hours at thirteen fifty. Rent, five seventy-five. Electric. Gas for the car, because the care home was six miles one way and the school bus only took the kids. What was left went to groceries, and what groceries there were went to the two people in the house who were still growing.
It was not noble. It was arithmetic. There was a number, and I was the only part of it that could be made smaller.
Ryan had left on the sixth of July. He took the truck and the good cooler. He said he had work lined up with a crew out of Grand Island, and he would send money when he got settled. He sent two hundred dollars in the middle of the month. I had not heard his voice since Kelly’s birthday, when he called for four minutes and she held the phone upside down.
I had not told anyone. That is the part I have to own.
I had not told anyone at church. We had gone to a little Methodist church out on the highway since Mason was a baby. I stopped going the second Sunday in July. On the first Sunday, three different women asked me where Ryan was, and I said “working,” and the third time I said it I heard how it sounded.
I was raised that you do not take. My dad farmed a quarter section of somebody else’s ground his whole life. The winter he broke his hip, the church ladies came by with a box, and he made my mother carry it back out to their car. I was nine. I remember the look on those women’s faces, and I remember thinking he was the strongest man alive.
So that was who was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. A woman who had been taught that the worst thing you could be was looked at.
I was not angry at Mason. What I felt was found out. I had thought two bowls on a counter was a thing children did not notice.
I prayed that night, which I had not done properly since summer. It was not much of a prayer. I said, Lord, do not let that man tell anybody.
That was the whole of it. I was still asking for the wrong thing.
The next evening was Friday. I got off at two, picked up Kelly, met the bus. I had a can of chili and half a sleeve of crackers, and I was heating the chili when I heard tires on the gravel.
It was not the cruiser. It was a red pickup with a dent in the tailgate. Deputy Larson got out of it in jeans and a seed cap, and from the other side came a short woman with gray hair cut practical and a nine by thirteen pan held in two oven mitts.
“Oh, no,” I said out loud, to nobody.
Mason was already at the screen. “It’s the deputy. He doesn’t have his car. He’s got a lady.”