The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

“I’ll say this much,” she said. “I owe Hank Moser a call back, and I have been working out how much I am allowed to tell him. I have known where that young man sleeps since the last week of September. I have him on the lunch program and I have a file drawer with a toothbrush in it. I have offered to make calls on his behalf, and he asked me, very respectfully, not to. He does not want to be anybody’s project. If you want to help him, Sandy, you had better figure out how to do it so he can still look you in the eye.”

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That night I made Glenn a pork chop and waited until he had eaten it.

“The boy in the lot,” I said. “I called the sheriff this morning.”

“Good.”

“No. It wasn’t.” And I told him.

Glenn listened to the whole thing with his hands flat on the table. He did not interrupt. When I got to the bells he looked out the window over the sink for a while.

“It’s going to freeze hard by the end of the month,” I said.

“I expect it will.”

“Kevin’s room is sitting there with a made bed in it.”

“Sandy.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“Then let me say it.” He was not angry. He was careful, which with Glenn is more serious. “This morning at half past six you thought enough of that boy to call the law on him. Now it’s suppertime and you want to hand him a house key. That’s a long way to travel in one day.”

“I was wrong this morning.”

“You might have been. I believe you were. But you’ve met him for forty minutes.” He turned his coffee cup. “I’m sixty-four years old. You’re here alone when I’m at the farm sale or up at my brother’s. I’m not going to say yes to a stranger in the next room because we feel bad. Feeling bad isn’t a reason. It’s just a feeling.”

It stung. It was also fair, and I knew it.

“Then what would be a reason?” I said.

He thought about it.

“Let me meet him,” he said. “Not at your church with eggs. Where he is.”

At a quarter past midnight I heard his pickup back out of the drive.

He told me afterward how it went. He parked his Silverado in our church lot with the lights off and the window down and waited. About ten till one the Buick pulled in, slowly, and stopped when the headlights found his truck.

Glenn got out and held up both hands.

“I’m Sandy’s husband,” he said. “I’m not here to run you off. I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to see who my wife fed breakfast to.”

He said the boy stood there a while deciding. Then he said, “Yes sir. I’m Eli,” and shook Glenn’s hand like somebody had taught him how.

They talked for most of an hour, leaning on the bed of the truck. Glenn asked what he meant to do after May, and Eli said the diesel program at the community college over in Hutchinson, if he could get the money to line up, because he liked engines and there would always be combines. Glenn asked how the Buick was running. Eli said it had been slow to turn over on the cold mornings.

“Pop the hood,” Glenn said.

He keeps a meter in the truck. The battery read twelve point one with the engine off, which is a battery on its way out.

“What are you running off of it at night?”

“Just the dome light. For homework.”

“How long?”

“An hour. Sometimes two, if it’s calculus.”

Glenn came in our back door at two in the morning. I was sitting up in the kitchen in my robe.

He hung his cap on the peg.