The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

The last of them

At ten to eight I was down to my last tray. The line still ran to the corner, because families who had already gone through kept getting back in it with cousins, and the jack-o’-lanterns up and down the street were burning low and lopsided.

My hands were cold even in my gloves, and my feet hurt, and I was thinking about the cocoa I was not going to make for anybody this year.

I had not let myself think about Owen and Lily all night. Now I did.

That was when I saw the co-op truck pull up at the stop sign at the corner.

It was the white one with the orange stripe, and it parked crooked half on the curb, the way a man parks when he is in a hurry.

Josh got out of the driver’s side still in his hi-vis vest and his work boots, with mud up to his knees.

He had been called out again that afternoon for a line down on a gravel road north of town.

I found out later he had not even been home to wash his hands.

He went around to the passenger door and lifted Owen out. My grandson was in his green dinosaur costume, the one with the soft spikes down the back and the tail that drags on the ground.

He had been wearing it since four o’clock that afternoon, at the mall in Ottumwa.

Owen went to the back of the line like a good boy. The people in line would not have it. “Let the grandson through,” somebody called, and they passed him forward, hand to hand, his tail bouncing behind him past the Wilsons’ cat and the Henderson house.

Josh walked up along the line behind him with his hands in his vest pockets, saying excuse me and sorry and thank you to every family he passed, the way his father would have.

“Grandma,” Owen said when he got to the table, out of breath. “The mall didn’t have popcorn balls. I asked every single store.”

I picked up a popcorn ball and put it in his hands. He held it like it was made of glass and read the label out loud the way he had learned to at school, his finger under each word. “Pop. Corn. Corn. Syrup. Sugar. Butter.”

“He cried the whole way home from Ottumwa,” Josh said quietly. “He said Halloween doesn’t count if you don’t go to Grandma’s. I got home at seven-fifteen and he was still sitting on the stairs in the costume.”

“So you brought him,” I said.

“So I brought him.” Josh looked at me, my tall son with his father’s eyes and his father’s jaw. “I’m sorry, Mom. I should have done more this week.”

“You were up a pole in the wind all week,” I said. “You did fine.”

Who came last

Then Josh turned around and looked back toward the corner, toward the truck. He did not say anything. I followed where he was looking.

There was somebody standing under the streetlight at the stop sign, next to the truck.

Even from that far away, I knew who it was by the shape of the long blond ponytail and the white puffy coat.

Kayla was holding Lily on her hip. Lily was in a fairy costume with wings that had gone crooked, and she was half asleep with her head on her mother’s shoulder.

Kayla did not move for a long minute. I could see her looking down the sidewalk, at the line, at the Henderson boy, now thirty-something, folding up a lawn chair, at Tom Rasmussen in his uniform at the end of my driveway. Then she started walking.

It was the longest walk I have ever watched anybody make. Eighty yards of sidewalk, past the people from her PTA still standing in line, past people who had just spent two hours commenting on her post.

Nobody said a word to her. I think they were waiting to see what I would do.

She stopped on the other side of my folding table. Her eyes were red and her mascara had run a little. Up close she looked very young, younger than thirty-four.

“I took it down,” she said. “The post. At seven-thirty. Three of the moms from PTA texted me pictures of the line.” She swallowed. “Nobody even said anything mean. They just sent me the pictures.”