The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

“Don’t say my name like it’s a, like it’s a case.”

“I’ll say I’m his grandmother and I’m asking a favor. Just the question.”

He ate a cracker. He ate another one.

“What’s the question?”

I told him. He turned it over, and I watched him decide.

“Okay,” he said. “But if it makes it worse, you stop.”

“If it makes it worse, I stop.”

That night I got out the First Lutheran church directory and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil. Gail had given me the names of the children who laughed. I did not need her list for most of them. In Cedar Fork, which has a grain elevator, a Casey’s, and a four-way stop, I could have named every family from the school picture alone.

There were six homes. I made six calls.

I will tell you what I said, because it was the same in each, and I wrote it on the back of an envelope first so I would not wander.

“This is Joanne Brekke, Nate Weller’s grandmother. I am not calling to ask you to do anything about anybody. I don’t want an apology and I’m not calling the school. I only want to ask a favor. Tonight, at bedtime, ask your child one question. Ask them what they would have wanted that room to do if it had been their own journal on that desk. That’s all. Then listen.”

The first call was to Robin Tollefson. She runs the bakery counter at the grocery, and her son Brody is the biggest talker in fifth grade. I had a feeling about Brody before she picked up.

She went quiet when I said it. Then she said, a little stiff, “Joanne, I heard it was just the kids being kids.”

“Maybe so.”

“Brody wouldn’t do something to hurt Nate. They’ve been in the same class since kindergarten.”

“I believe you,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling you first.”

Another silence, longer. I could hear a dishwasher running.

“What was the question again?” Robin said.

I told her. She said she would ask it. I didn’t say thank you, because I did not want it to sound like a deal.

The second call, to Lance Neddermeyer, a hog farmer with a boy named Ryker, went worse. “I don’t know that I’m going to put that on my kid,” he said. I said I would only be asking him to ask. He said he’d think about it. I thanked him and I meant it.

Pam Haas started crying before I finished the sentence. Her daughter Kaylee had laughed, then gone straight to bed, and Pam had thought it was a headache. “I’ll ask her tonight,” she said.

The fourth and fifth and sixth went fast. I hung up the last one at 9:20 and stood at the stove with both hands flat on the counter for one minute by the clock.

Then I went and checked on Nate. He was asleep, finally, with the lamp still on, and the notebook was under his pillow. I turned the lamp off. I did not touch the notebook.

I did not know whether a single parent would ask the question, or whether a child who got asked would say anything worth hearing. I had no plan beyond six phone calls and a prayer.