The Night I Knocked on Her Door

The thing Emma said

We made supper together. Hamburger gravy over toast, which the boys call shingles because Josh called it that, and Josh called it that because his dad did. Cole set the table. Sam put the napkins on everybody’s chair instead of by the plates and nobody corrected him.

Halfway through supper Emma said, “I fell asleep in first period again today.”

She said it like she was confessing a crime.

“Again?”

“Mrs. Brenner said it’s the third time. She said she’d have to call you if it happened again.” She pushed her toast around. “I’m not mad. I just get tired. Sam had a bad dream at two and I sat with him.”

I looked at my daughter across the table. Fourteen years old. Purple under her eyes like a resident on her third night.

And I thought about what Becky said at the door. Not too much. But a lot.

And then I thought about what Marilyn had said at the mailbox, and I made myself hear it without the tone I’d put on it. Those children are by themselves an awful lot.

It was true. That was the thing that made me so angry. It was true.

What I decided

I did not sleep that night either. I lay there with the speech in my head and I tried something different. I tried to say it the way Josh would have said it.

Josh was not a big talker. He was the man who would fix your mower and then not let you pay him and then show up at your kitchen door two weeks later to ask if it was still running good. He used to say there was no problem in the world that a casserole and a direct question couldn’t at least start on.

So I asked myself the direct question. What was it I needed?

I needed somebody to be in the house at night so my daughter could sleep. Somebody grown. Somebody close.

There was exactly one grown person within shouting distance of my house at night. She was seventy-one and she’d just called the county on me.

I lay there and laughed out loud in the dark, because it was crazy, and because I knew I was going to do it.