The Chair at Signing Day

What Rick said

Caleb did not tell me right away. He waited until that evening, when we were home and Daddy had gone back to his place and the house was quiet.

He came and sat at the kitchen table while I was rinsing dishes. He turned his phone over and over in his hands, face down.

“He’s been drinking, Mom,” he said. “That’s what he said. For a long time. Since before you two split up, he said, but worse after.”

I turned off the water. I did not turn around yet.

“I knew he drank,” I said.

“He said it got real bad. He said he lost jobs over it, not just quit them. He said he lived in his truck for most of one winter in Oklahoma.” Caleb stopped. “He said every time he thought about calling, he was too ashamed. And then the longer he didn’t, the worse it got, and then it had been too long to call at all.”

I dried my hands. I sat down across from him.

“He showed me a coin,” Caleb said. “From his meetings. Nine months, it says. He said it’s been eleven now. He’s got a job at a feedlot outside Dumas now, a real one with a paycheck. He said he saw the notice for the signing in Miss Sue Ann’s paper. Somebody up there gets it.”

That was what had been on his flat palm in the parking lot. A little bronze coin.

“He said he figured if he just showed up and sat down, maybe it would be like he’d been there.” Caleb looked at the table. “He said he knew it was wrong the second I stood up. He said he knew it before that, really.”

I did not say anything for a while. I was thinking about seven years. I was thinking about how many times I had driven to Amarillo with that folder.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

Caleb looked up.

“I told him he could start with you,” he said. “I told him I’m not the one he owes first. I told him you were the one who stayed, and Grandpa was the one who drove, and if he wanted to come around, he could start by going to see my mom. Not me. You.”

He shrugged, like it was nothing. It was not nothing.

“I told him I wasn’t mad,” he said. “I was mad a long time. I’m not anymore. But I told him I’m not going to be the easy part.”

I reached across the table and took my son’s hand. He let me, which at eighteen is not a given.

“When did you get so smart?” I said.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Three nights a week for four years. It’s a long drive, Mom. You end up talking.”

Thursday

Our paper comes out on Thursdays. It is eight pages most weeks, ten if somebody important dies or the football team makes the playoffs.

The picture ran on the front page, above the fold. Sue Ann had picked the one where Caleb’s arm was on the back of the chair and Daddy was looking at the camera with his mouth a little open, like he still did not believe he was there.

Under it, the line said: Caleb Pruitt signs to wrestle in college, with his grandfather, Walt Rausch, who drove him to four years of practices and tournaments.

She did not mention Rick. She did not mention me either. She did not need to.

I went over to Daddy’s place that evening with a pan of enchiladas. He lives a mile and a half out of town, in the same house I grew up in, with a windbreak of cedars on the north side and a pole barn he still keeps too clean.

When I came in the back door, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the paper spread out under the light and Mama’s good sewing scissors in his hand.

He did not hear me come in. The left ear.

So I stood there in the doorway and watched him cut that picture out of the paper.