The Spot In Line
The sack race was the one thing Bo had talked about all week. I had him at the courthouse lawn a full twenty minutes early, hopping in place in his sneakers like the gun was already up.
He was eight. He had practiced in the yard every night, falling on the grass and getting up grinning, the knees of his jeans stained green.
Lorene ran the children’s games at the Cedar Bluff Harvest Festival. She had run them for six Octobers, with her clipboard and her whistle on a lanyard and her folding card table set up under the big elm.
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I walked Bo up to the chalk line. She looked at him over her reading glasses and did not write his name down.
“We’re a little short on sacks this year,” she said. “I’ve got to keep it to the family kids first.”
Her two grandchildren were already standing in the lineup. Tyler and little Maddie, each with a burlap sack bunched up around the waist. Lorene’s daughter Kim stood off to the side with her phone out, filming them.
I thought I had misheard her. “Bo’s been practicing for two weeks, Lorene. He’s right here.”
She capped her pen. She did not even lower her voice. That is the part I keep coming back to, that she said it where the other mothers could hear.
“Honey, these are my grandbabies. Bo is a sweet boy, but he isn’t really family. You know that.”
I felt it land in my chest like a flat hand. Three women I knew from church were standing close enough to go quiet all at once.
Bo heard it too. He was eight and he was not slow.
His face did the thing a child’s face does when it is trying very hard not to come apart in public. The chin first, then the eyes.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he said.
That is the sentence that nearly took my knees out from under me. “I don’t have to,” he said.
I looked at Lorene and she looked back at me, calm as a woman marking off a grocery list, and I understood she believed she had done nothing wrong at all.
I took Bo’s hand and we walked back across the lawn, past the funnel cake stand and the pumpkin table, and I did not let him see my face until we were in the truck.