The Birthday Box on His Porch

The candle

We were maybe twenty minutes down the road, coming around Lubbock in the dark, when Tanner dug into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled something out.

He held it up in the light from the dashboard. It was a birthday candle, one of those thin blue ones from the grocery store, burned down maybe a quarter of the way and bent a little in the middle.

“Raylene put sixteen on the cake,” he said. “At lunch. I blew them out. And then I took one.”

I looked at it, and then at him, and then back at the road. “Why?”

He turned it in his fingers. He didn’t look at me.

“Because you weren’t there,” he said. “You’re never there when I blow them out anymore. Not since I was little. It’s always Dad’s year or you’re working.”

He set the candle on the dash in front of me, standing it up against the windshield.

“So I saved you one,” he said. “I was going to give it to you next week. I didn’t know you were coming.”

I had to pull over. I am not ashamed to say it. I pulled onto the shoulder of the Lubbock loop with my blinkers going and put my face in my hands and cried for the first time since two in the morning.

Tanner didn’t say anything. He just reached over and rubbed my back in a slow circle, the way I used to rub his when he was sick and couldn’t sleep.

He had learned that from me. I did not know he had been paying attention.

When I could see again, I picked up the candle off the dash. That was what he had smelled like on the porch, I realized. He had been carrying that candle around in his pocket all afternoon.

“I’ll keep it forever,” I told him.

“You don’t have to keep it forever, Mom. It’s a candle.”

“I’ll keep it forever,” I said again, and he rolled his eyes and smiled, and I pulled back onto the road.

Two weeks later

I want to tell you what happened after, because people always want to know if it lasted, and I am glad to say that, so far, it has.

Two Saturdays later, Tanner had a home game in Abilene, his first start of the season. He plays second base. He is not a big hitter, but he does not miss much with his glove.

I got there early, the way I always do, and sat on the third base side with my thermos. It was cool and windy, the way March and early April are out here, with the flags snapping.

In the second inning, I looked up and saw Cody coming up the bleachers.

He had on a clean pair of jeans and a pearl snap shirt and a cap from a water hauling company I did not recognize. He had driven four hours to watch his son play second base for seven innings.

He sat down next to me without asking, like it was the most normal thing in the world. Tanner saw him from the field and took his glove off his hand, then put it back on, which is about as much as a sixteen-year-old boy will show you.

“You found work,” I said, nodding at the cap.

“Started Monday,” he said. “Hauling water out to the rigs. It’s not much. It’s something. I put in at the hospital, too, like you said. They called me back for an interview.”