The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

The furnace at the Dermot place went bad on a Tuesday night in the middle of September. A crack in the heat exchanger, the fire department said after, the kind that lets a slow smolder start behind a wall where nobody can see it until it isn’t slow anymore. Nobody was hurt, thank the Lord and the smoke detector Roy Dermot had put fresh batteries in not two weeks before, but they lost the whole upstairs to smoke and heat and had to live for six weeks in Roy’s brother’s basement two towns over while the insurance people did whatever insurance people do, which in my experience is slowly.

The church took up what Pastor Ward calls a love offering the very next Sunday, and people brought coats and canned goods and a folding cot, and I gave twenty dollars myself and thought that was the end of what I personally had to do with it. I heard about the fire itself the ordinary way word travels in a town this size, standing in line at the diner on Main while two women ahead of me discussed it over their coffee, one of them saying the fire department figured a crack in the heat exchanger had let smoke build up behind the hallway wall for the better part of a week before anybody smelled it, and the other saying thank the Lord nobody was sleeping upstairs when the smoke detector finally went off. I nodded along the way you do, filed it under things in town that are sad and none of my particular business, and went home and told Dale about it over supper, and neither one of us thought another thing about it past putting our twenty dollars in the offering plate.

I did not know Wyatt sat two rows behind Micah Dermot in Mrs. Castellano’s sixth grade homeroom. I did not know that in late September, Micah had started wearing the same thin gray hoodie every single day because it was the only coat that had survived the fire, or that the boys had started calling him Gray Hoodie behind his back, the way twelve year old boys will find the one true thing about another boy’s situation and turn it into a knife without ever once thinking of it as cruelty.

I found all of this out afterward, in pieces, the way you piece together a quilt from scraps somebody hands you one at a time. Mrs. Pruitt in the school office told me some of it. Dana told me some of it. Micah himself, eventually, sitting at my own kitchen table eating banana bread, told me the rest.

What I know is that sometime in early October, Wyatt asked to walk home from school a different way, past Begley’s Western and Farm Supply on Main, and that he went in alone three separate afternoons before he did anything, just looking at the coat rack and the boot wall like a man pricing a tractor he knows he cannot afford yet. Ed Begley has run that store for thirty eight years and he told me later that he noticed a boy standing by the Carhartt coats for the better part of twenty minutes on a Thursday, not touching anything, just looking at sizes, and that when the boy finally came up to the counter he asked, quiet, whether Mr. Begley could find out a boy’s coat and boot size without that boy ever knowing somebody had asked.