The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
“Yes, sir.” There was a shake in the boy’s voice now. He was eighteen years old, on a bridge in the dark. “Sir, I have to tell you something, and I need you to hear me. I can’t keep that promise anymore. I work three nights a week. I’m not out here the other four.”
Nothing from Pop.
“If I’d stopped for gas tonight, I’d have been ten minutes later. I can’t have that. I’m sorry. I have to tell your son.”
A long breath on the recording.
“Then you tell him to his face,” Pop said. He sounded like himself for that one sentence, like the man who ran this farm for forty years. “You don’t do it on a telephone, and you don’t send a note. You walk in his kitchen and you look at him, and you tell him his father asked you to lie. That’s on me. That’s not on you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He’ll have a time with you. The way you’re got up.”
“Yes, sir. I figured.”
“You tell him anyhow.”
“Yes, sir. I will.”
The screen went black.
The gravy had burned. I could smell it.
Nobody moved. The clock over the refrigerator ticked, and out on the highway a grain truck went by and rattled the storm windows the way they always do.
Sarah was crying without any noise, with her arms wrapped around herself. I found out later she had only seen the videos four days before. Evan had stopped her in the school parking lot on a Wednesday. A boy she had never spoken to in her life, a boy the other kids kept a wide path around, came up to her car and said, “You’re a Petersen, right? Out on 92? I need to know the best way to talk to your dad.”
She said she almost rolled the window up.
She did not. She sat on the hood of her car with him for an hour and watched all three, and then she came home and asked me if a friend could come to supper. She never said a word about why, because Pop had told him to do it to Doug’s face, and Evan meant to do it the way he had been told.
So he did not come to our house to court my daughter. I want that clear. He came because of a bridge.
“Dougie,” Pop said.
Nobody had called my husband that since his mother died.
Doug looked at him.
“I didn’t want you to know.” Pop’s hands were shaking on the oilcloth. “I didn’t want you to have to do it. Your mother and I took her dad up to that place in ’89, and he looked at me through the glass of that door. I didn’t want to look at you like that.”
Doug opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.
I have been married to that man for twenty-six years. I have seen him bury his mother and lose a crop to hail and stand up in front of two hundred people to read scripture without a tremble. I had never seen him not know what to do with his own face.
He had read from Matthew that very morning. I had sat in the fourth pew and listened to him do it in his good gray suit. I was a stranger, and ye took me in.
It was still in the bulletin in my purse.
“Sir,” Evan said from the door, very quietly. “That’s all of it. I’m sorry I brought it to your supper. He wanted it done in person, and I didn’t know another way to get in.”
He zipped his coat.