The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

The man whose father left

Near the end, after seven-forty, when I was down to my last tray, a man in his fifties stepped up to the table.

He was tall and a little stooped, in a feed cap and a canvas coat, and he had a girl of maybe five by the hand, dressed as a ladybug.

He did not take a popcorn ball right away. He just stood there a second and looked at the tray, and I saw his jaw working the way men’s jaws do when they are deciding whether to say something.

“You won’t remember me, Mrs. Pruitt,” he said finally. “Doug Meyer. My folks rented the little house on Second Street, behind the bank. That would have been 1986.”

I said I was sorry, I did not remember. He nodded like he had expected that.

“My dad left that September,” he said. “Just packed up the truck and went to Missouri and that was it. My mom was working nights at the nursing home in Centerville. That Halloween I went out in a pillowcase with eye holes cut in it, because that’s what we had.”

He cleared his throat and looked down at the ladybug. “I only went to one house. I was too ashamed to go to any more, in a pillowcase. I came to yours because the light was on and I could see you through the window.”

“You put two popcorn balls in my bag,” he said. “You said, ‘One’s for your mom.’ I took it home and she cried at the kitchen table. That was the only treat I got that year. I’ve thought about it every Halloween since.”

I could not say anything. I reached over the folding table and took his hand, the big rough hand of a grown man who had been a little boy in a pillowcase, and I held on to it.

“This is my granddaughter,” he said. “Her name is Ava. I wanted her to have one.”

I picked out the two best ones left on the tray and put them in her little plastic pumpkin. “One’s for your mom,” I told Ava, and Doug Meyer turned around and walked back down my driveway fast with his hand over his face.