The Shoebox My Father Carried In

Behind him, my sister had gone very still.

I was thinking about the ladies at church. Every Sunday of my childhood, some woman in a hat would bend down and ask me how my chest was. I used to put my hand on it at night to see if I could feel what was wrong.

“We went to church,” I said. “I was at church every week.”

“Our church. Forty people, and I knew every one of them and what they drove. I sat on the aisle and your mother sat on the other side of you. Didn’t you ever wonder why you never once sat on the end of a pew?”

I had not. I was forty years old and I had never wondered that.

“And school,” I said.

“I drove you. Every morning for twelve years, and I was parked out front at ten till three every afternoon.”

“Jenny rode the bus.”

“Jenny rode the bus.”

“I thought,” I said, and my voice did something I did not like, so I started again. “I thought you didn’t trust me on the bus. I thought you figured I’d do something to embarrass you.”

“I know what you thought.” He said it very low. “I watched you think it. I watched you sit over against the door of that truck with your books on your lap, every day getting a little further off from me, and I couldn’t say one word.”

Nobody in my yard was pretending to look at anything else now.

“He came twice,” Leonard said. “That I know of. The first time was the Fourth of July at the river park, the summer you turned three. We thought enough time had gone by. Your mother wanted you to see the fireworks. I turned my back to pay for a lemonade and when I turned around a man had you by the hand and was walking you toward the parking lot.”

Something cold went down the length of my back.

“He had a belt buckle,” I said.

Leonard stared at me.

“A big silver one,” I said. “With a horse on it. I was looking right at it. He gave me his lemonade to hold.”

“You remember that.”

“I remember you carrying me. You were running. You were holding me so tight it hurt, and you put me in the truck and you didn’t say anything the whole way home, and I thought I’d been bad.” I pressed my fingers against my mouth for a second. “I have thought my whole life that I did something bad at a picnic.”

“You didn’t do anything,” he said. “You were three. You took a lemonade from a man who smiled at you. I got to you before he got to his truck, and there were too many people for him to do anything but smile at me, too. He said, Next time, Hobbs. That’s all he said. And that was the last crowd you were ever in.”

Doris spoke up from under the maple.

“The second time was the summer of the hail,” she said. “He sat in a blue pickup at the end of your lane from noon till dark. I saw him from my garden and I called over on the telephone.”

I turned to Leonard. “That was the day you put me in the cellar.”

“I told you there was a tornado watch.”