The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
“He can hear it from here,” he said. That was the only explanation he gave.
He put a chime on every outside door that same afternoon. Sixty-two dollars at the hardware store. It sounds like a doorbell in a dentist’s office, and I have never loved a noise so much.
That left the boy.
Doug did not mention him all week. Not once. Sarah stopped trying by Tuesday. I let it lie, because I have been married long enough to know that pushing Doug Petersen only sets him deeper.
Friday night I woke up and his side of the bed was cold.
It was ten minutes to two.
I went downstairs in my robe. The kitchen was dark. His chore coat was gone from its hook. I looked in on Pop, and Pop was snoring with the radio on low.
Then I saw the light, way down at the end of our lane, by the mailbox.
It was the dome light of Doug’s pickup. He was parked there with the engine running, right at the highway, and he was standing outside the truck in nine or ten degrees with his collar turned up and my good steel thermos in his hand.
I stood at the window with my arms crossed and I watched.
At six minutes after two, headlights came down 92 from the east. A small car. It slowed before our mailbox, the way I now knew it had slowed there every working night since January.
Doug stepped out to the edge of the gravel and raised one hand.
The car stopped. The window went down.
I could not hear a word from that far. I only know what Evan told Sarah afterward, and it was not much.
He said my husband handed the thermos in through the window.
He said my husband told him, “It’s black. I didn’t know how you take it.”
And he said, “Black’s fine, sir.”
Then Doug said, “He’s in the big house now. You don’t have to look for him anymore.” And after a second, “I’d take it kindly if you looked anyhow.”
“Yes, sir,” Evan said.
The car sat there a while longer. I saw Doug put his hand on the roof of it, flat, the way he puts his hand on the neck of a good horse. Then he stepped back, and the boy drove on home.
Doug was out there with a thermos the next working night, and the one after that. He has not missed one since.
Easter came three weeks later.
Our church is a white clapboard one on the county blacktop with a hundred and forty people in it on a good Sunday, and every one of them has known Doug since he was in diapers. The Petersen pew is the fourth from the front on the left. It has been since 1919.
Sarah had asked Evan to come. She asked her father first, the night before, standing in the doorway of the den.
“Dad, can Evan sit with us tomorrow?”
Doug kept his eyes on the paper. “It’s a church, Sarah. I don’t own the seats.”
That was not a yes. She came and found me in tears. I told her to wait and see.
We were already sitting when he came in. Pop on the aisle, then Doug, then me, then Sarah. The organ was going. I heard the big door at the back, and then I heard the room.
You know that sound. It is not talking. It is a hundred and forty people not talking all at once.