The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

“Thirty-five miles from his school and his job both. He’s a senior, Sandy. He carries a 3.8. He runs the scale and the grain probe out at the elevator from four in the afternoon until the last truck, and during fall harvest the last truck is whenever it is. He’d lose every bit of that to sleep on a cot in a town where he doesn’t know a soul. So he said no thank you. I don’t blame him. Monday I called Mrs. Aldrich, the counselor at the high school, and I’m waiting on her to call me back.”

“And nobody thought to tell the church?”

“I was coming to your office this morning to tell you and Ray both. I wanted the counselor’s answer in my pocket first, so I’d have more to bring you than a problem.” He almost smiled. “You beat me by about an hour.”

I looked past him at the car. The boy had gotten out. He was standing at the open trunk with his back to us, pulling a clean shirt over his head. He was tall and narrow, with wheat-colored hair that needed cutting. He folded the shirt he had taken off and laid it in the trunk as if the trunk were a dresser drawer.

“He’s not using anything,” Hank said, like he had heard me think it. “He’s not selling anything. He works, he goes to school, and he sleeps about five hours a night in a Buick. That’s the whole of it. I’ve brought him a breakfast burrito from the Kwik Shop twice, and I gave him a sleeping bag out of my own garage that’s good down to zero.”

“Why here?”

“Walmart ran him off the second night. They’ve got a policy. The city moved him along out of the park twice, because the park closes at eleven and that’s the ordinance. Jeff can’t have him sleeping on co-op property on account of the insurance, and Jeff feels sick about it.” He nodded toward the back corner. “This is outside city limits, so it’s mine. And until twelve minutes ago nobody who owned the ground had complained.”

Nobody who owned the ground.

“He’s not breaking any law that I can find,” Hank said. “Unless you tell me he’s trespassing.”

Unless I told him.

I stood on that step with my keys in my hand. Behind me, on my desk, was Thursday’s prayer list. I had typed it the afternoon before. I type the same closing line on it every week, and have for years: for the hungry, the homeless, and all who have no one to pray for them.

I had typed that line something close to a thousand times. And the first time one of them turned up sixty yards from my desk, I called the law.

“Is he trespassing, Sandy?” Hank asked, gently.

“No,” I said. “No, he is not.”

“Good.”

“Why did he pick us, though? Out of anywhere?”

Hank put his hat back on. “That’s his to tell. Go ask him. He’s a polite kid. He won’t bite.”

---

I did not want to walk across that parking lot.

My face was hot and my keys would not hold still. It is about sixty yards from the side door to the hedge row, and I felt every one of them.

The boy saw me coming. He shut the trunk and stood up straight with his hands at his sides, the way a child stands when the principal walks in. Up close he had a few freckles and tired, steady eyes. There was grain dust still in the creases of his knuckles.

“Ma’am,” he said, before I could open my mouth. “I can move the car. I’m sorry. I’m usually gone before anybody gets here.”