The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

I had practiced something on the way across. It left me.

“I’m the one who called the sheriff,” I said. “I’m Sandy. I work in the office. I saw your car three mornings running and I thought you were trouble, and I called. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

He looked down at his boots. They were work boots, laced tight, with milo chaff in the eyelets.

“It’s all right, ma’am,” he said. “People call.”

He said it without one ounce of meanness. He said it the way you would say that it rains. That was worse than if he had been angry with me. Angry I could have stood.

Through the back window of the Buick I could see how he lived. A sleeping bag was rolled tight on the back seat with a bungee cord around it. His work coat was folded on top for a pillow. On the dash sat a calculus book with a pencil shut inside it, and a little wind-up alarm clock lay face down on the console, the kind I had not seen in years.

“Eli,” I said. “Of every lot in this town, why did you pick ours?”

He looked up at the steeple before he answered.

“A couple of reasons,” he said. “It’s dark back here, and it’s off the road. And I figured church people would leave me be.”

I did not say anything. I could not.

“That wasn’t meant to be smart,” he said quickly. “I only meant, I didn’t think anybody here would mind. I thought if anywhere would be all right, a church would.”

“What’s the other reason?”

He looked embarrassed for the first time. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“The bells,” he said.

We have a real bell that the ushers ring on Sunday, and we have the chimes. The chimes are a gray box in the office closet wired to speakers in the steeple. They play one hymn at seven in the morning, one at noon and one at six in the evening. I am the one who sets them. I have picked the hymns for nineteen years and I do not believe one person had ever mentioned it to me.

“That clock quit on me,” he said, nodding toward the console. “And my phone doesn’t always hold a charge till morning. But the bells go at seven, every day. So I don’t oversleep school.” He shrugged one shoulder. “And it’s kind of nice. You wake up and there’s music. It’s how I know the night’s over.”

Right then, as if somebody had planned it, the speakers in the steeple clicked and the seven o’clock hymn started up over our heads. That morning it was “Blessed Assurance.”

The boy smiled a little, at the ground.

“There it is,” he said.

I stood in my own church parking lot and I was more ashamed than I had been in my adult life. A seventeen-year-old who had been put out with two trash bags had looked over the whole town of McPherson and decided that the safest place in it was the back corner of a church. He had trusted us with exactly that much. Leave me be, let me hear the bells.

And I had not even managed that.

---

I could not undo the call. I could do the next thing.

“Have you had breakfast?” I said.

“I’m fine, ma’am.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

He nearly smiled again. “No ma’am. Not yet.”

“What time do you have to be at school?”

“Seven fifty.”

“Then you have forty minutes. Lock your car and come with me.”