What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress
Everybody laughed. Todd laughed.
At Christmas it was, “Must be nice, driving around Indiana on my nickel.”
At Easter, in front of the girl Todd was seeing then: “Don’t let him buy you dinner, honey. He’s still into me for thirty-one hundred.”
It took Todd six years to pay it off, fifty and a hundred at a time, and Ray mentioned it at every holiday table for all six. The last payment came in a card. No note. Just a check and my son’s signature.
After that Todd never asked us for a thing. Not when Lucy came early and spent nine days in the hospital. Not when their furnace went out in January. I found out about the furnace two years after the fact.
And where was I, all those Thanksgivings?
I was at the other end of the table. I was saying, “Ray,” in a soft voice that meant nothing, and then asking who wanted pie.
I told myself it was between a father and a son. I told myself Ray was only teasing. I told myself a great many things for a great many years, and then I got in a truck at sixty-six and had two hundred miles of flat road to stop telling them.
Somewhere past Van Wert I said it out loud, to the windshield.
“You let that happen, Janet.”
It did not feel better to say. But it felt true, and I was going to need true things where I was headed.
Their house is a brick ranch in a subdivision north of Fort Wayne, on a street with young maples and basketball hoops. I pulled up a little before two o’clock.
There was a sign in the front yard.
A realty sign, on a white post. And hanging under it on two little chains, a smaller board: Sale Pending.
I had seen maybe forty photographs of that house over the years. Lucy on the front step with a missing tooth. Ben and his bicycle. I had never seen that sign in a single one. I sat in the truck and understood that my son had been standing in his yard since April, choosing his angles.
Through the front window I could see the living room. There was no couch. There were boxes stacked against the wall, and a lamp sitting on the floor.
I got out. I left the cooler on the seat. I took my purse.
Missy came to the screen door before I had made it up the walk. She must have seen the truck. Her face went white, then red.
“Janet.” She put her hand flat on the screen. “What are you doing here? Is something wrong? Did you forget something of the kids’?”
“No, honey. I found something of Ben’s.”
She looked at my purse. She looked at my face. I watched her work it out, and I watched her shoulders come down about two inches, like a woman setting down a bucket she had carried a long way.
“Oh,” she said. Just that.
“Is Todd here?”
“He’s in the garage.” She glanced behind her. “Janet, he’s not going to come out.”
“That’s all right.”
“I mean it. You know how he is.”
“I know exactly how he is. I was there when he got that way.” I nodded at the porch. “I’ll wait.”
She went in. I heard the door to the garage open, and voices, low. His got lower instead of louder. Todd has never been a yeller. Neither was his father.