The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
On the phone the car was moving again. It made a slow turn into our lane. You could see my own house go by, every window dark. I was asleep in there. We were all asleep in there.
It pulled around to the little house and stopped with the headlights on Pop’s back door, which was standing wide open with snow blowing in across his linoleum.
“This is my place,” Pop said on the recording, and he sounded surprised.
“Yes, sir. Let’s get you in.”
Then, very quick and low, a different voice from the old man. A scared one. I had never heard my father-in-law sound scared in twenty-six years.
“Don’t you tell my boy.”
“Sir?”
“Douglas. Up at the big house. Don’t you tell him I was out. He’ll put me in town. He’ll put me up in that place on the hill with the rest of them, and I’ll never hear my barn again.” There was a breath. “Don’t tell my boy I’m slipping. Promise me.”
The heater fan ran.
“Okay,” Evan said. “I promise. Not tonight. But you have to promise me you’ll stay in.”
“I’ll stay in.”
The clip ended there.
The second one started before anybody could move.
January 30. 1:52 a.m. Four degrees.
The same road. The same mailbox. This time he was on the other side of the highway, walking east toward town, and he had a coat on over the pajamas but it was Ruth’s coat. Her good red church coat that he had never let me give away. It did not come close to closing across him.
“Hi there,” Evan said on the recording, pulling up beside him with the window down. “Remember me?”
“You’re the driver.”
“That’s right. Where are we headed tonight?”
“Ruth gets off at two. She doesn’t like to stand in that parking lot by herself.”
Ruth had been a night nurse at the Madison County hospital for thirty-one years. Pop drove in and picked her up every single shift, because he did not like her on the highway alone after dark.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Well, hop in,” the boy said. “We’ll go get her.”
And God forgive me, I thought, don’t. Don’t lie to him. But he was smarter about it than I would have been.
He drove a mile toward town with the heat blasting, and he asked Pop how he had met her. Pop told him about a box social at the Methodist church in 1964 and a lemon pie he bid four dollars on because he had seen who carried it in.
He was laughing by the end of it. My father-in-law was laughing in a stranger’s car at two in the morning in his dead wife’s coat.
Then there was a quiet, and Pop said, in a small voice, “She’s gone, isn’t she.”
“Yes, sir,” Evan said. “I think she is. I’m real sorry.”
“I knew that. I know that most of the time.”
“I know you do.”
“I just got it in my head she was waiting.”
“That’s a good thing to have in your head,” the boy said. “Wanting to pick her up. That’s a good husband.”
He turned the car around in the Fosters’ field drive. He took Pop home. On the screen you watched him walk the old man to the back door of the little house, one black coat and one red, and you watched him reach in and do something to the door before he pulled it shut.