The Boy In The Black Eyeliner

“Not in my house,” my husband said. “Not looking like that. You can turn around and go back out the way you came.”

The boy had one arm out of his coat.

He stood on the rug inside my kitchen door with a bunch of yellow grocery store flowers in his other hand, and the March wind was still coming in behind him because nobody had thought to shut the door.

He was the palest child I had ever seen. Black hair dyed so dark it looked blue under the kitchen light. Black around both eyes, drawn on careful, like a girl would do it. A long black coat that hung to his shins.

And a collar. A leather collar around his throat with little silver spikes on it, the kind you would buy for a dog you did not trust.

I will be honest, because this whole story is me being honest. I looked at that collar before I looked at his face.

“Dad,” Sarah said. She was seventeen and she had her hand hooked through the boy’s elbow. “Dad, please. This is Evan. I told you he was coming.”

“You told me a friend was coming to Sunday supper,” Doug said. He did not raise his voice. Doug never raised his voice. He had a way of getting quieter that was worse. “You did not tell me what.”

Not who. What.

I saw the boy hear it.

I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand and the gravy starting to catch on the bottom of the pan, and I did nothing. I want that written down too. I am forty-eight years old and I stood there and stirred.

“Douglas,” I said. That was all I managed.

“I am a deacon in this church, Michelle,” he said, still looking at the boy. “I have my father at this table. I am not going to sit and ask a blessing over a meal with that across from me.”

Pop was already in his chair at the far end, eighty-one years old, with his napkin tucked into his collar the way he had done since before I married into this family. He was looking at his plate. I thought he had not followed any of it. That winter there was a good deal Pop did not follow.

“Sir,” the boy said.

His voice surprised me. It was low and polite and plain Iowa, the voice of every farm kid who ever bagged my groceries.

“Sir, I only need about four minutes. Then I’ll go and I won’t come back if you don’t want me to.”

“You’ll go now,” Doug said. “Michelle, take those flowers from him so he has both hands for the door.”

That was the cruelest part. It was so tidy. He said it like he was asking me to pass the salt.

I did not take the flowers.

The boy looked at Sarah. She had tears standing in her eyes but she gave him the smallest nod, and I understood that the two of them had talked about this. They had known it might go exactly this way.

“Yes, sir,” Evan said.

He pulled his arm back into his coat sleeve. He laid the yellow flowers on my counter beside the bread basket, gently, the way you would lay down something that could bruise.

Then he took his phone out of his pocket, walked three steps to our kitchen table, set it face up on the oilcloth between the butter dish and Doug’s plate, and pressed play.