The Duffel Bag on My Porch

“Peg.” Trent set his cap on the counter, slowly, the way a man does when he means to be reasonable. “I took her arm. That’s all I did. I took her arm to turn her around because she would not look at me when I was talking to her. I didn’t hit that girl and you know I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t hit her.”

“Then what is this?”

“You held on,” I said. “I watched your hand. You held on after she’d turned.”

He did not have an answer for that.

“I live here,” he said finally. “A year I’ve lived here. You can’t put a man out of where he lives with no notice. There’s a law about that.”

“There may be,” I said. “I expect you could be right. You can take that up tomorrow with whoever you like, and if somebody with a badge tells me I owe you thirty days, I’ll hear him. But you are not sleeping tonight under the same roof as that girl. That part I’m sure of.”

“Over one time.”

“Over this time.”

Missy had started to cry, quietly, with her hand over her mouth. He looked at her and waited. I could see him waiting for her to say it, to say she was going with him, and I could see her trying to find the words and not finding them.

I said the only other thing I had to say to him.

“Trent. If you want to make this right, you can. It starts with you saying out loud what you did, to her and to her mother, without the word tired in it. I’d be glad to see that day. But you’ll do it from somewhere else.”

He picked up his cap. He walked through my front room, and the screen door did not slap that time. He closed it with his hand. I heard his boots on the step, and the tailgate, and then his pickup going down the lane, not fast. The gravel just ticked.

I waited until his taillights turned onto the county road. Then I took the telephone off the kitchen wall and dialed the sheriff’s office, the regular number, which I have known by heart since Don’s heart trouble.

“This is Peg Hadley out on the Marmaton road,” I told the dispatcher. “A man put his hand on my granddaughter hard enough to mark her. She’s sixteen. He’s left the place. I’d like a deputy to come see her arm tonight, please.”

She asked if anyone needed an ambulance and whether he was likely to come back. I said no to the first and that I did not think so to the second. She said a deputy was on his way.

Missy had heard every word.

“You called the law on him,” she said. “His truck’s not even off our gravel.”

“I did.”

“He hasn’t got anywhere to go, Mama.”

“He’s got a brother in Nevada.” I meant Nevada, Missouri, forty minutes east, which is how everybody around here means it. “And he’s got a paycheck.”

“She bruises easy. She always has. You know she has.”

“Then the deputy will write down that she bruises easy. He’ll write down what you tell him, same as what I tell him.”

She sank into a chair.

“Missy. This is your home as long as you want it. I’m not putting you out and I never will, no matter what you say to me tonight. But it’s not his home. Not anymore. Those are the two things I know, and I’m not going to be argued off either one.”