The Door My Son Pointed Me To
“I wanted you to hear it from me,” Mrs. Larson said, “and not on Saturday from somebody at the ball field. I had you in my room when you were eight years old, Nathan. I remember a boy who cried for two days when the class hamster died. So I am saying this as somebody who knew that boy. Children do not choose a word like ‘again’ by accident.”
“We had an argument. It’s a family thing.”
“I am sure it is.” She glanced down the fence line. “Your mother fed this school for nineteen years. Half the people standing here ate her rolls. You might give some thought to how that sentence sounds to the rest of us.”
Nobody said a word. Then the man in the seed cap, who is named Tom and who farms south of the river, said, to no one in particular, “She slipped me a second roll every day of fifth grade.”
Somebody laughed, low. It was not a mean laugh. That may have been worse for him.
Ava had been standing between them the whole time, with her backpack hanging off one shoulder. She looked up at her father.
“Are you going to tell Grandma sorry?” she said. In that voice.
And Molly, on his hip, saw me over his shoulder. Her whole face came open. “Gamma,” she said, and put out both arms. “Gamma’s late.”
Nathan turned around.
I have known that face for thirty-three years. I have seen it with chicken pox and with a broken collarbone, and I saw it at his father’s graveside. I had never seen it look like that. He looked like a man who has walked past a mirror in a store and not known for a second who it was.
He did not say anything. He could not have, I don’t think. I walked over and kissed Molly’s hand and put it back on his shoulder, and I said to Ava, “I’ll see you at lunch tomorrow,” and I went to my car.
I was not going to take that baby out of his arms in front of forty people. That would have been its own kind of sentence.
It was nearly nine that night when somebody knocked on my front door.
Knocked. I noticed it before I got out of my chair. He had a key on his ring, and he had used it Monday without a thought.
Nathan was on the porch by himself, holding my roaster. It had been washed. The lid was tied on with a dish towel the way I always tie it, which told me he had been watching me do it all his life without knowing he was.
“Can I come in?”
“You can.”
He set the roaster on the counter and stood in the middle of my kitchen as if he had forgotten how the room was laid out. I did not help him. I sat down at the table and waited.
“I talked to Ava in the truck,” he said. “I asked her what she meant by again.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I do it all the time. She did the voice.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “She has it down, Mom. She said, ‘You say there’s the door, nobody’s making you.’ She said I say it to her mother. She said I told Jack once that if he didn’t like supper he knew where the door was. He’s six.”
“Do you say it to Brittany?”