The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

Micah did not say anything either. He walked straight across that fellowship hall, past the dessert table, past Betty Shears still half standing with her cane, and he put his arms around my grandson in front of the whole church, and Wyatt, who had held that secret through a classmate’s cold shoulder and his own grandmother’s one direct question and six full weeks of silence, finally put his face down into Micah’s shoulder and cried like the twelve year old boy he still was underneath all that careful keeping of a secret.

Joyce Pemberton, who plays piano for the children’s choir and cries at every baptism this church has had since Reagan was president, was already dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin before the boys even finished hugging. She told me afterward it was the best cry she’d had at that church in two years, and she meant it as the highest compliment she knew how to give.

Dana Dermot came next, and Roy behind her, and Dana knelt down right there on the fellowship hall linoleum in her good church dress to put her arms around a boy half her height, and she said into his hair, “You didn’t have to do that, baby. You didn’t have to do any of that,” and Wyatt, muffled and still crying, said the only thing he said out loud in that whole hall that night, which was, “Nobody should know what their coat costs at school.”

I have turned that sentence over more times than I can count since. A sixth grade boy understood something about shame and money and what a child carries silently into a cafeteria that a lot of grown men and women never learn their whole lives. He did not do it to be thanked. He went to considerable trouble, three trips to a feed store and a sandwich bag of cash and strict instructions to two grown adults, specifically so that he never would be.

Pastor Ward did eventually get his pie served, though by then half the room had stopped eating to come by our table and put a hand on Wyatt’s head or his shoulder, the way this community does when it decides somebody has done something worth laying hands on. Dale did not say much. My husband is not a man of many words in a crowded room. But when Ed Begley came by, Dale stood up and shook his hand for a long moment and said, “You did right by him too, delivering it quiet like that,” and Ed Begley, who does not embarrass easily, had to look at the ceiling for a second before he answered.

Mrs. Pruitt found me by the coffee urn later and told me the rest of what she knew, the twice-counted hundred and ten dollars, the sentence about nobody thinking it was him, and she said, “Mrs. Teague, in twenty two years in that office I have had grown men come in red faced trying to get out of paying a late fee. I have never once had anybody, child or adult, try that hard to make sure nobody knew they had paid somebody else’s.”