The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

Thursday morning he got on the school bus without looking at me through the window. I stood in the driveway with my coffee until the bus was out of sight, and I did what I always do when I am afraid. I went out to the barn and fed Mabel, and she leaned her whole warm weight against my hip.

“Well,” I said to her. “It’s up to the children now.”

She blew a long breath through her nose, which is her opinion on most things.

I did a load of laundry, then a second that did not need doing.

At 3:45 the bus came back and Nate got off with his green notebook, and he went to his room, and I stood in the hallway with my hand on the doorframe.

He did not say anything about school. At supper he ate two helpings of Doyle’s chili and said he’d seen a pileated woodpecker from the classroom window. That was all.

At 6:30 there was a knock on the front door.

It was Robin Tollefson, with her coat buttoned wrong, and Brody beside her in the porch light. He was a stocky, red-faced boy with a cowlick, holding a square of tinfoil with something in it, and he looked like a boy being walked to the principal’s office by his own conscience.

“He has something to say,” Robin said. “I told him he didn’t have to do it tonight. He said he did.”

Brody looked at his sneakers. Then he looked up, not at me, past me, down the hall toward the sound of the television.

“I did the voice,” Brody said. “In class. I thought it was a bit. Then Mom asked me the question last night, and I said I’d want everybody to be quiet. And then I thought about how I wasn’t.”

I let it be as long as it was.

“I made him a coffee cake,” he said, and held out the foil. “Well, Mom helped. It’s cinnamon. I didn’t know what else.”

I took it. It was still warm.

“Would you like to say it to him?”

His whole face went red to the ears. “I don’t think he wants to see me.”

“He might not,” I said. “You can leave it with me and he’ll know it came from you.”

Robin put a hand on his shoulder. “I asked him the question at the table,” she said to me. “He told me what he’d done before I got to the end of it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s all I asked.”

They left. I stood in the kitchen with the warm cake in my hands. I heard a floorboard creak in the hallway, and I knew without looking that Nate had been standing at the corner the entire time.

He didn’t say anything about it. He came to the table, unwrapped the foil, cut himself a square with the bread knife, and ate it slowly.

“It’s pretty good,” he said.

“I thought so.”

“There’s pecans in it,” he said, as if that were the important part. He took a second square back to his room.

Friday I did not eat breakfast. I put on my good blue slacks and the cardigan Jenna gave me, and at 2:50 I drove to the school and parked beside the flagpole. Doyle had taken the afternoon off. He sat in the passenger seat, not talking, with his Sunday cap on.