The Grand Marquis Across the Highway
The Call
My phone rang while we were still sitting there. It was Jean.
I almost did not answer. My mother-in-law and I had always been polite with each other, the way two women are when they love the same man in different ways.
She had never once called me directly. She always called Jesse.
“Amber,” she said. Her voice sounded like she had been crying, or like she had been thinking hard, which with Jean can look the same. “Is Jesse home?”
“He’s right here.”
“Don’t give him the phone yet. I want to talk to you first.”
I waited.
“He called me from the jail lot,” she said. “Told me what he did. Told me he put you out of the truck.” She stopped. I heard her set down her coffee cup.
“I raised him better than that. And I’m the one that put it in him, that he has to fix everything for Dusty.”
She took a breath. “I said that to a fifteen-year-old boy at his daddy’s funeral. I’ve been thinking about it all evening. I had no business saying it.”
I did not know what to say, so I said, “Jean.”
“Dusty needs to sit this one out,” she said. “I’m telling you, and then I’m going to tell Jesse. Let him go to his hearing. Let him see the inside of it for a while. Maybe it’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”
I handed Jesse the phone. He held it to his ear and listened, and he said, “Yes, ma’am,” three times. Then he said, “Mama, I promised you,” and his voice went thin, and he did not finish.
I could hear her through the phone, not the words but the tone of it. Soft. Firm. A mother taking back something heavy she had handed her boy a long time ago and never should have.
When he hung up, he put the phone down on the porch boards and did not say anything for a long while.
Then he wiped his face with the back of his wrist, quick, the way men do when they think you are not looking.
“She let me off,” he said. “Twenty-two years. She just let me off.”
I got up out of the glider and sat down beside him on the step, and I put my hand on his back between his shoulder blades, where it was tight as a fist.