The Birthday Box on His Porch

“That’s good, Cody.”

“Yeah.” He looked out at the field. “I’m sleeping, too. Most nights.”

In the fifth inning, Tanner turned a double play, clean as anything, and both of us were on our feet yelling before we knew it. We sat back down and looked at each other and laughed.

In the seventh, with two outs, Cody reached into his shirt pocket and handed me an envelope. It was a plain white bank envelope, folded once.

“It’s two hundred and fifty,” he said. “Half. I’ll have the rest by summer.”

I started to say he didn’t have to. He stopped me with a look.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Let me do it, Jill. Please.”

So I let him. I put the envelope in my jacket pocket and said thank you, and that was all either of us said about it. Some things do not need any more words than that.

After the game, Tanner came up to the fence with his cap pushed back and dirt all down one side, and his daddy and his mama were standing there together. I do not think he had seen that since he was seven years old.

He did not make a big thing of it. He just grinned at both of us. “Y’all see that double play?”

“We saw it,” Cody said.

“We saw it,” I said.

Halfway home

But that is not the part I keep coming back to. The part I keep is the drive home from Levelland that night, on his sixteenth birthday, after the candle.

Tanner did talk the whole way, like he promised. He told me about the girl in English class, whose name turned out to be Megan, and about mowing the church yard, and about how Raylene laughs at her own jokes before she finishes them.

He told me about his dad, too. How quiet the house had been since January. How he had thought it was something he did. How he kept wanting to ask and could not make himself do it.

“I’m glad I asked him,” he said, coming down off the caprock past Post. “On the porch. I almost didn’t.”

“I’m glad you did too,” I told him. “That took more nerve than anything I did all day.”

“You drove four hours, Mom.”

“Anybody can drive four hours,” I said. “Not everybody can ask their daddy the hard question and stand there for the answer.”

He thought about that for a while. Then he said, “Thanks for not telling him off. I know you wanted to.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you had your jaw doing the thing,” he said, and did an impression of me clenching my teeth that was so good I had to laugh.

We stopped at the Whataburger in Post, the same one where we used to trade him on Sundays, and he got a honey butter chicken biscuit even though it was nine at night, because it was his birthday and I was not going to argue.

He ate it in the cab with the wrapper in his lap, and then he talked a little slower, and then a little slower than that.

Somewhere on the long dark stretch between Post and Snyder, I looked over and he was asleep. Sixteen years old and six foot tall, with his hood up and the blue candle still standing on the dash, asleep against the truck window halfway home.