The Name in the Thursday Paper

What Josh found out

The next Tuesday Josh drove to his mother’s after chores. He did not tell me he was going. He told me afterward, sitting on the edge of our bed with his boots still on, which he never does.

He had found her in the garage, in Harold’s old chore coat, sorting through a coffee can of bolts on the workbench. She did not need any bolts. She was just in there.

“Mom,” he said. “His name is Wyatt. I need you to say it.”

She did not say it. She put the lid on the coffee can and looked out the garage window at the empty machine shed, where Harold’s 4020 used to sit before she sold it.

“Do you know when the last time was,” she said, “that anybody in this town said your dad’s name to me?”

Josh did not know.

“The fair, a year and a half ago,” she said. “Merle Sanders said, ‘Harold would have liked that steer.’ That’s the last time.” She turned around. “Eight years, Josh. The first year they all say it. Then they stop, and it’s like he was never here.”

Josh said she did not cry. He said that was the hard part. She just stood there in his dad’s coat.

“I thought if there was a little boy named Harold,” she said, “people would have to say it. Every day. At church, at school, at the grocery store. He’d be back in their mouths.”

“You could have asked us,” Josh said.

“You’d have said no.”

“Maybe. But you didn’t ask.”

She sat down on the stool by the workbench then, and Josh said she looked about ten years older than she had in church.

“I know what I did,” she said. “I knew it Monday when I hung up with Gail.” She shook her head. “And then your wife thanked me. In the fellowship hall. She thanked me, and I wanted to crawl under the bars table.”

Josh did not tell her it was all right, because it was not. He told her he loved her and that his son’s name was Wyatt, and then he went home.

“I don’t know how to fix it,” he told me in the dark. “I don’t think she knows either.”

I lay there with Wyatt asleep in the bassinet beside me, his breath like a little bellows, and I thought about Sharon in that garage in a dead man’s coat, with nobody saying his name.

I was still angry. But I was not only angry anymore.