The Night I Drove Three Hours for My Kids

Seven Forty

I didn’t sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold and watched the sky go pink over the bean field across the road.

At 7:40, Tom’s phone buzzed on the table between us. The screen said “Darrell.”

Tom looked at me. I nodded. He picked it up and put it on speaker and set it down flat on the table.

For a long time there was nothing. Just breathing. Ragged, heavy breathing, like a man who has run up a long hill. I could hear a robin somewhere on his end, and the creak of his porch boards.

Then Darrell said, “Tommy.”

Just that. His brother’s name, the little-boy name, the one nobody else has called Tom in forty years.

“I’m here,” Tom said.

“I’m standing on my porch,” Darrell said. His voice was wrecked. “I got her envelope. I got the check. I got the note.”

Nobody said anything.

“I left them,” Darrell said, and then he broke down. Not a little. A grown man of fifty, crying so hard he couldn’t get words out, on his own front porch on a Sunday morning where his neighbors could see him.

Tom closed his eyes. I watched him grip the edge of the table.

“I left them up there,” Darrell said, when he could. “I woke up on the couch at six and I didn’t know where they were. I swear, Tommy, for a minute I didn’t know. And then I went outside to look in the truck, and the cooler was in the back, and I remembered. And I couldn’t breathe.”

“They’re home,” Tom said. “They’re asleep. Shelly got them at one in the morning.”

“I know. I know. I saw the note. I knew she must’ve.” He was quiet for a second. “Are they okay? Is Ellie okay? Josh?”

“They’re okay,” Tom said. “The campground hosts fed them and sat up with them until Beck got there.”

“I thought they would,” Darrell said. “That’s what I told myself. Howard and Ruthie, those nice old folks. I told myself they’d look out for the kids, and you’d send somebody. I told myself that the whole way home.”

“You told my son that,” Tom said. “He believed you. He waited on that bluff for you to come back, because he thought you’d be scared if he wasn’t there.”

The sound Darrell made then is not one I want to describe.

I reached over and took the phone. I hadn’t planned to. I just did.

“Darrell,” I said. “It’s Shelly.”

“Beck.” He could barely say it. “Beck, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll make it right, I’ll drive up today, I’ll…”

“No,” I said. “You won’t drive up today.”

He stopped.

“The check is good,” I said. “Cash it. You and Tom are square, and you won’t ever have to call this house about money again. I meant every word of that.”

I took a breath.

“And I meant the note too,” I said. “You don’t come back. Not to this house, not to my kids. Not like this.”

He didn’t argue. I think I would have hung up on him if he had. But he didn’t. He just said, very quietly, “Yes, ma’am.”

“You were drinking,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You promised Tom you wouldn’t, and you were drinking, and you drove seventy miles home on Highway 61 in the dark, and you left a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old on a bluff with no food.”