The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
“I said out,” Doug told him.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said again. “I’m going.”
And he did. He stepped back onto the rug by the door with his hands folded in front of him like a child waiting outside a principal’s office, and he stood there.
The phone started talking.
I need to back up one week, because I thought I knew what that Sunday was going to be.
We live on Highway 92, about six miles west of Winterset, in the white farmhouse Doug’s grandfather built. Three hundred and twenty acres of corn and beans. A machine shed, a corn crib nobody uses, and across the yard, forty steps from my back porch, the little house.
The little house is where Doug’s grandparents lived after they handed the farm down, and where Pop and Ruth moved when they handed it to us. Two rooms and a bath and its own back door facing the highway.
Ruth died four years ago in April. Pop stayed in the little house alone. He would not hear of anything else.
“I have slept forty steps from that barn for sixty years,” he told Doug. “I am not going to start sleeping somewhere I can’t hear it.”
So I carried his supper across the yard on the nights he did not come over, and Doug checked his furnace, and we all told each other he was doing fine.
He was mostly doing fine. He called me Ruth twice that winter. He asked Doug at Christmas whether the hogs had been fed, and we have not had hogs since 1998. Doug laughed it off both times, and so I laughed it off too.
That is how it goes in a family. One person decides a thing is nothing, and everybody else is so relieved they agree.
The Sunday before, Sarah had come and found me in the laundry room.
“Mom. I want to have somebody to supper next week.”
“A boy somebody?”
She went pink. “A friend. His name’s Evan. He’s a senior. He works nights at the truck stop up at the interstate.”
“Does your dad know him?”
“No.” She picked at the lint trap. “Mom, he doesn’t look like people here. I need you to know that before he comes. He dresses kind of dark.”
“Dark how?”
“Just dark. But he’s the nicest person I have ever met in my life, and he needs to talk to Dad about something, and he says it has to be to his face.”
I folded a towel. I thought I knew exactly what a boy needs to say to a girl’s father to his face. I thought, she is seventeen, Lord help us.
“Is this something I should be worried about?”
“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “I promise. It isn’t even about me.”
I did not believe her. I told Doug a friend of Sarah’s was coming, and I left out the word dark, because I did not want a week of it.
So that is my part. I sent that boy up my porch steps with no warning ahead of him, and I let my husband be surprised, and then I stood at my stove and stirred.
The phone was propped against the butter dish now. I had done that. I had walked over from the stove without deciding to, and tipped it up so it would stand.
“Michelle, shut that off,” Doug said.
“In a minute,” I said.