My Boys Worked the Food Bank Line

I waited. “His dad left when he was nine,” she said. “Did you know that? Just left. Never paid a dime of support.

“His mom cleaned motel rooms and worked nights at a nursing home, and Todd stood in the commodity food line with her.”

“He doesn’t talk about it,” she said. “He talked about it last night. He said he thinks every man who’s behind is his dad.

“He sees a guy late on support and he sees his dad’s truck backing out of the driveway. He just heard two months and that was it.”

I sat at my kitchen table and thought about a nine-year-old boy standing in a commodity line in a coat that did not fit.

Wyatt is nine. I thought about Wyatt slipping granola bars into boxes for a kid like him, and I had to set the phone down a second.

“He wants to talk to you,” Heather said. “In person. He asked if he could come Saturday. To the food bank.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I said it was a free country, and Deb always needed people who could lift.

Saturday it was warmer, twenty-two degrees and gray. I did not have the boys that weekend.

I went anyway, because Deb was short, and because I had signed up for the whole month without thinking about it.

Todd’s truck was already in the lot when I pulled in. He was sitting in it with the engine running, the way I had sat in mine the first day.

He got out when he saw me. He is bigger than me by a couple of inches and forty pounds, and he stood there in his dealership jacket in the cold with his hands in his pockets like a kid sent to the principal’s office.

“Shane,” he said. “I said a thing in front of your boys. I said it more than once.

“It was wrong, and I said it about a man I didn’t know anything about. I stood next to you at basketball a whole winter and I never asked about your arm.”

I told him no, he did not. He nodded. He took it. I will give him that.

He did not explain it away, and he did not ask me to say it was all right. I did not say it was all right, because it was not, not yet.

“I’m going to tell the boys too,” he said. “At supper. Same place I said it. Heather and I talked about it.

“They heard me say it, so they can hear me say I was wrong.” I told him that was between him and them, but I would appreciate it.

We went in together. Deb looked at the two of us coming through the door and raised her eyebrows over her reading glasses.

Then she put us at the same folding table, side by side, because that is the kind of woman Deb Hanson is.

It was a strange morning. Todd is a salesman, and he talks to everybody.

In ten minutes he knew the names of both Lutheran men and where they had farmed. But when the line started, he got quiet, the way Jackson had gotten quiet.

He watched them come through. The old people. The young mothers. A man from the window plant, a different one.

Around eleven, a woman came through with three kids, all of them under six, and one of them had on a coat that was too small at the wrists.