The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

Then, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Eli came to church supper straight from the elevator with his sleeves rolled, and without being asked he carried forty folding chairs back to the closet and stacked them the right way, six to a cart. Marlene watched him do it. She found me at the dish window afterward.

“He stacks them better than the trustees,” she said.

It was not an apology. I had not earned one from her anyway. But at Christmas there was a card in my office mailbox with his name on it in her handwriting, and inside it was a gift certificate to the men’s store on Main Street and a note that said: for a graduation suit, when the time comes. Have them leave room in the shoulders.

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The winter went by the way winters do, one supper at a time.

He turned eighteen on the ninth of December. I made a chocolate sheet cake. Eli could have signed a lease that day. He did not bring it up, and neither did we. The forty dollars kept turning up on the counter every Friday.

He studied at our kitchen table under a good light. Some nights he came in from work past midnight and I would hear him set his boots down in the hall. Side by side. Every time.

He drove out toward Galva every other Sunday afternoon to see his mother, at an hour when the boyfriend was at work. He never said one hard word about her at my table.

“She’s got to live somewhere too,” he told me once, drying a pan. That was all.

I mailed her a graduation announcement in April. I did not ask anybody’s permission. I wrote on the back: Row 14, on the home side. I will hold a seat.

There was one other thing I did, and I told no one.

The day after he moved in, I went into the office closet and changed the seven o’clock chime. He had told me one night, when I asked, that he did not know the names of any of them, but there was one he liked best. He hummed a little of it, off key, with his ears going red. It was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

I set it to play at seven every single morning, and I never changed it again. He could not hear it from our house on the west side of town. That was not the point. It was the hymn that had told a boy in a cold car that the night was over, and I wanted it going out over that back corner every morning of the world, in case anybody else was ever out there listening.

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McPherson High holds graduation in the Roundhouse, which is what this town calls the gym, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of May.

I got there an hour early and took Row 14 on the home side. I laid my purse on one seat, my sweater on another, and Glenn’s cap on a third.

They came in by ones and twos.

Glenn sat beside me in the good shirt he wears to funerals and weddings. Pastor Ray came next, with his wife. Mrs. Aldrich came up the bleacher steps in her navy dress and sat down on my other side, and patted my knee without a word. Jeff from the elevator came in his co-op cap and took it off when he saw the flag. Hank Moser came in a pressed white shirt, off duty, and it was the first time I had ever seen him without the hat.

Marlene came. She sat on the far end, straight as a ruler, with her pocketbook on her lap. Don and his wife slid in behind us.