The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

“That boy is doing his calculus under a dome light at one in the morning,” he said, “on a battery that’s going to leave him sitting some night when it’s ten degrees. He had his boots set side by side on the floorboard, Sandy. Lined up.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “He called me sir eleven times. I counted.”

“Glenn.”

“Go make up the bed,” my husband said. “I’ll ask him. It’ll go down easier coming from me.”

---

It did not go down easy from anybody.

Glenn asked him Thursday night, in the lot. Eli said no.

“I appreciate it, sir. I do. But I’m not going to be somebody’s charity. I’ve got it handled until December, and then I’m eighteen and I can sign a lease.”

“On what?” Glenn said. “First month and a deposit in this town is twelve hundred dollars. What do you clear in a week?”

Eli told him.

“Then you won’t have twelve hundred by December, and you surely won’t have it and tuition too.” Glenn said he let that sit a minute. “Here is what I’m offering, and it isn’t charity. We have a room nobody sleeps in. I’ll rent it to you for forty dollars a week. You’ll do your own wash and keep it picked up. You’ll eat supper with us when you aren’t working, because my wife cooks for four and there are two of us. It runs through graduation, and then you’re your own man and we shake hands.”

“Forty dollars isn’t rent, sir.”

“It’s what I’m asking. You want to argue me up, go ahead.”

Eli was quiet for a long time.

“I’d have to tell my mom,” he said.

“I’d think less of you if you didn’t.”

Mrs. Aldrich handled that part. She drove out toward Galva herself on Friday afternoon, and his mother signed a one-page letter saying Eli had her permission to stay with us, and that we could sign a school form or take him to a doctor. Mrs. Aldrich told me later that his mother read it twice, signed it, and then asked in a small voice whether he was eating.

Eli moved in on Saturday morning. Everything he had fit in the trunk and the back seat. Two trash bags, a box of schoolbooks, a sleeping bag, and a pair of dress shoes in a grocery sack.

He stood in the doorway of Kevin’s old room and looked at the bed.

“I can sleep on top of the covers,” he said. “So you don’t have to wash the sheets.”

“Eli,” I said. “Get in the bed like a person.”

Glenn put a new battery in the Buick that afternoon, and Eli stood beside him and handed him the wrench. He paid Glenn back for it at ten dollars a week, on top of the forty. Glenn took every dollar. I started to object the first Friday, when Eli laid the bills on the kitchen counter, and my husband gave me a look that closed my mouth.

“A man who’s paying his way sleeps better,” he told me afterward. “Don’t you take that from him.”

---

I would like to tell you our church rose up as one body and blessed the whole business. It did not.

Word was around by Sunday. It always is. Some people came straight over at coffee hour. A widow I had typed onto the prayer list fifty times pressed a twenty into my hand and said, “For his gas, and don’t you tell him where it came from.”