The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
There is a moment at our table every Sunday where everybody waits for Doug. He bows his head, and he asks the blessing, and he has done it at the head of that table since the day his father handed him the chair.
He bowed his head. We all did.
Nothing came.
I could hear him breathing. I opened my eyes a crack, which I know you are not supposed to do, and my husband had his eyes shut tight and his jaw working and his big hands knotted together so hard the knuckles had gone white.
He could not do it. He had told that boy he would not ask a blessing with him at the table, and now that he wanted to, he could not get one word out.
It was Pop who did it.
“Lord,” Pop said, plain and clear, with nothing slipping in it at all, “thank you for this food, and for the hands that fixed it. Thank you for my boy and his family and this place. And bless my driver, who you sent when I didn’t know enough to ask. Amen.”
“Amen,” Evan said, very low.
Doug did not say amen. He reached over and picked up the bowl of potatoes, and he held it out to the boy across the corner of the table until the boy took it.
That was all. That was the whole of it, that night.
We ate. It was the quietest Sunday supper of my life. Pop told the lemon pie story again, the entire thing, and Evan listened as if he had never heard it, and asked what color her dress was.
“Yellow,” Pop said. “Like those flowers.”
I got up and put them in water.
I am not going to tell you my husband turned into a different man by the time the dishes were done. He did not. He is a Petersen. They change the way a river moves a bank.
He did not say he was sorry at the table. He did not say it on the porch when the boy left, either. He stood in the doorway and watched that little rusted car go down our lane and turn west, and he stood there a good while after the taillights were gone.
Then he went to the machine shed.
He came back with the folding cot we use at the county fair, and his sleeping bag, and his toolbox. He carried them across the yard to the little house, forty steps, in the dark.
I watched from the porch. The light went on over there. Through Pop’s kitchen window I could see my husband on his knees at the back door with a screwdriver, taking the latch apart.
He slept over there that night, on the cot, across the inside of the door, so that his father would have had to step over him to get out. He slept there the next night too. And the next.
On Thursday he and I drove into Winterset together and sat down with Pop’s doctor, and Doug listened to all of it with his cap in his hands. Nobody said a word about the place on the hill.
On Saturday he and two men from church moved Pop’s bed, his chair, his radio and Ruth’s picture into my sewing room on the ground floor of the big house. The window in that room faces the barn. Doug measured it himself before he would agree to the room, standing where the pillow would go and looking out.