The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

Glen in my classroom doorway

He came on Friday afternoon, after the buses. I was down on my knees picking up crayons from under the reading rug, and when I looked up he was in the doorway of my classroom with his hat in his hands, too big for the little room, the way men always look in a kindergarten.

“You put my folks on Facebook,” he said.

“I asked them first,” I said. I stood up. “Grandma picked out her dress. Grandpa said yes. They decided, Glen. I didn’t spend a dollar of their money.”

“I know you didn’t.” He turned the hat around once in his hands. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Then what?”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at the little chairs, the alphabet on the wall, the pumpkin drawings drying on the counter.

“She gets confused when there’s a lot of people,” he said finally. “She gets scared.

“Last Easter at church she didn’t know where she was and she started crying in the narthex, and I had to walk her out to the car with the whole town watching. If she does that on the courthouse steps in front of three hundred people, Kelsey, she’ll never live it down. Not because she’ll remember. Because they will.”

I hadn’t known about Easter. Nobody had told me.

That was what he was guarding, I understood then. Not the five hundred dollars. Her. The woman she used to be, who balanced the creamery books to the penny and never once in her life cried in public. He was trying to keep anybody from seeing her any other way.

“If she gets scared,” I said, “I’ll walk her home. I’ll be one step below her the whole time. You have my word.”

He nodded. He didn’t look like he believed me, but he nodded.

“Will you come?” I asked.

He put his hat back on.

“I’ve got a load of soybeans to haul for Vern on Saturday,” he said, and he left.