The Duffel Bag on My Porch

He sat down at my kitchen table, at the bare spot where the fourth plate had been. He asked Missy to sit too, since she is the parent, and she did.

“Kaylee, would you show me?” he said. “Your mother and grandmother are right here.”

She pushed up her sleeve under the kitchen light. He looked without touching. He took four photographs with a little ruler laid alongside, and he let her tell it, and he did not hurry her. Then he had me tell what I saw from the stove, and he asked Missy what she saw from the doorway.

“The end of it,” Missy said, very low. “I saw his hand on her.”

He wrote that down.

“Has he ever done anything like this before, Kaylee?”

She looked at her mother. It was only a glance, but I caught it.

“No, sir,” she said.

Wade waited a moment longer than he needed to. Then he laid his pen down and talked to us the way Don would have, straight across.

“Here’s what happens next, so nobody goes to bed thinking I’ve promised something I haven’t. This is a battery report. It goes to the county attorney, and what becomes of it is the county attorney’s decision, not mine and not yours. Because she’s a minor, the state will hear about it, and somebody will likely telephone you. And in the morning I’d take her by the school nurse. Let a second person write down what she sees. Two records are better than one.”

“I’ll have her there at eight,” I said.

“Now, Miss Peg. He told you he’d lived here a year and you couldn’t just put him out.”

“He did.”

“He’s not altogether wrong. If he wanted to make something of it, that would be a civil matter, and he’d be within his rights to try. I won’t tell you different to make you feel better. But he walked out under his own power and nobody laid a hand on him. From where I sit, that was a man leaving.”

“What can you do, Wade?”

“I can go have a word with him. That’s all of it, and it’s all inside my job. I’ll tell him there’s a report on file with his name on it. I’ll advise him to stay clear of Kaylee while it’s open, and I’ll tell him honestly how it will look to the county attorney if he doesn’t. And when he wants his tools, he calls me, and I’ll stand in your yard while he loads them, so nobody has cause to say a cross word.” He looked at Missy when he said the next part. “I can’t run a man out of the county, and I wouldn’t tell him I could. But he’ll know exactly where he stands.”

Missy did not answer him. She was turning her phone over and over in her lap.

At the door he put his hand on Kaylee’s shoulder, lightly, the uninjured side. “You did a hard thing tonight,” he said. “Harder than the 800. If you think of anything else you want me to know, anything at all, your grandmother has my number.”

She would not look at him.

I turned down her bed and left the hall light on, the way I did when she was small, and I went downstairs and locked both doors for the first time since Don’s funeral.