The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
“The latch on his back door doesn’t catch unless you lift it. I think that’s how he gets out so easy. And he goes between about one-thirty and two-thirty. Every time.” He swallowed. “My grandma did the same. It was always the same hour with her.”
“Your grandma,” I said. It was the first thing I had said to him.
“Yes, ma’am. Down in Creston. She raised me.” He looked at the floor. “She got out one November when I was twelve. I slept through it. The mail lady found her in the morning out by the road. She lived, but she lost some toes, and she wasn’t ever the same after. So I don’t sleep real hard anymore. And I look at the shoulders when I drive.”
He nodded to Pop. “Goodnight, sir.”
“Goodnight, driver,” Pop said.
The boy put his hand on my doorknob.
And my husband stood up.
His chair scraped back so hard it hit the wall. Sarah flinched. I think she thought her father was going to put that boy off the porch with his own two hands, and for one second I thought so too.
Doug did not look at any of us.
He walked to the stove. He took a plate down from the stack I had set out, the good ones with the wheat pattern, and he stood there holding it.
Then he started filling it.
Roast beef. Potatoes. He looked at the gravy, saw it was ruined, and went around it. Green beans. Two of my rolls. He did it slowly and carefully, like a man doing a job he had never done before, and I realized that in twenty-six years I had never once seen my husband dish up a plate for another person.
He carried it to the table.
There were five places laid. He set the plate down at the one beside Pop.
Then he walked across the kitchen to the door, where the boy was standing frozen with his hand on the knob, and he stopped in front of him.
They were about the same height. I had not noticed that.
Doug held out his hand, palm up.
The boy looked at it. He did not understand. I think he thought he was being asked for the phone.
“Your coat,” Doug said. His voice was rough as a gravel road.
Evan unzipped it. His fingers were not working very well. He shrugged out of it, and under it he had on a plain white button shirt, ironed, with the creases still in the sleeves. He had ironed a shirt to come and be thrown out of my house.
Doug took the long black coat. He turned to the row of hooks by the door, where his own canvas chore coat has hung every day of our marriage and where nobody else’s coat goes.
He hung the boy’s coat on the hook beside it.
Then he shut my kitchen door against the wind, which none of us had managed to do in all that time, and he went back and sat down in his chair.
The boy still had not moved.
“Sit down, son,” Pop said. “It’s getting cold.”
Evan sat. He put his napkin in his lap. He looked at the plate my husband had made him as if it might be taken back.
Sarah slid into the chair across from him and wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
I turned off the burner under the burned gravy and sat down myself.