The Tape That Cleared My Grandson

“Phil,” I said, “I’m not asking anybody to take anybody’s word for it. Not Mason’s, not mine, not Rusk’s either. You’ve got cameras in every aisle in this store, I’ve watched the monitor behind your register plenty of times. I’d like you to pull the footage from aisle nine, going back maybe twenty minutes, and I’d like the register receipts from that same hour, so we know who was in that aisle and who actually paid for what. If that tape shows my grandson pick that knife off the peg and put it in his bag, you will not hear one more word out of me, and he can apologize to this man himself. But if it does not show that, I want to know who it does show.”

Phil looked at me for a second, and then he looked at the line of customers that had stopped pretending not to watch us, and he made the call a good manager makes, which is the call that costs him the least in the end even if it costs him something right now.

“Donna, hold my line a minute. Rusk, come on back to the office. Mrs. Capps, you and Mason too, if you don’t mind waiting.”

I did mind waiting, in the sense that every minute Mason stood in that store with people looking at him was a minute too long, but I did not say that, because waiting with dignity was the only tool I had left to use, and I used it.

Mason is my son Denny’s boy. Denny drives long haul out of the Dallas yards, mostly east to Memphis and Atlanta and back, and that week he was two days out, loaded for Memphis, and could not have turned that truck around if the Pope himself had called him, not without losing the load and the week’s pay with it. His wife Angie works the three to eleven shift at the nursing home over in Cleburne, so on the days Denny is on the road, picking Mason up from school and getting him fed and seeing to his evening is my job, and I have done it gladly since Mason was in diapers. We had stopped at Tanner’s on the way home because Angie’s hens had gotten into the feed sack and torn it, and Mason likes picking out the scratch corn himself, likes standing in front of the big bins and reading the different brands like other boys read baseball cards. He had his backpack with him because he goes straight from school to my house on those days, and the bag had been riding open on the cart handle the whole time we were in the store, the way a boy’s bag always is, because he had stuffed his jacket in it when the store got warm.