The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

My Son At The Lane

He got out and he stood looking at my empty table and my cigar box of ones and fives and my two bare shock-stands where forty autumns of shocks had stood.

“Mom,” he said. “What are you doing.”

I told him I was selling shocks. I told him I had sold out.

“You can’t just set up down here,” he said. His face was red and it was not from the cold. “I built the stand. I’ve got shocks sitting up there not moving, I’ve got twelve people drove past me this morning, and now I know why. You’re underselling me at my own driveway.”

“My driveway,” I said. “Your father’s gravel.”

He opened his mouth and he shut it again. There is not much a man can say to that.

“I’m not trying to take anything from you,” he said. “That’s not what this is.”

“I know it isn’t,” I said, and I meant that too. “But look at what it is anyhow, Gary. Look at where you’ve got me standing.”

He looked. I watched him look. He looked at the river rock and the cigar box and the two bare stands, and he looked at his mother in her cardigan with twine burns on her fingers, and for the first time since March I think he saw me instead of a problem he had to solve before it broke.

“People are talking,” he said, lower. “You’re making me look like I did something to you.”

I looked at my boy, who is a good boy under the plan-making, who lost his daddy in March too and dealt with it by trying to run everything in sight so that nothing else could get away from him. I understood him better than he thought. That did not mean I was going to go sit at the house.

“Gary,” I said. “What did you think would happen.”

He did not have an answer. He stood in the gravel his father laid and he looked at me, sixty-eight and sold out by noon, and something in the plan came loose.

The Girl Who Wanted To Learn

What finished it was not Gary. It was a little girl.

While Gary was standing there not knowing what to do with his hands, a car pulled into the lane behind his truck. It was the young mother, the one who had come by earlier, the Vorhees girl, Amber, with her little one. She got out with the child on her hip, a girl of maybe five with a winter hat on too early in the season.

“I’m sorry, I know you’re sold out,” Amber said. “We came back anyway. Ruthie wouldn’t stop talking about the straw houses.” She bounced the girl. “That’s what she calls your shocks. Straw houses.”

The little girl looked at my bare stands and her face fell the way a small child’s face falls, all at once and all the way.

I got down on my knee in the gravel, which Gary watched me do like he thought I would crack, and I did not crack. I took the girl’s mittened hand.

“Would you want to learn to tie one yourself?” I asked her. “I’ve got stalks in the barn. I could teach you how. Then you’d have your own straw house and you’d know how to make another one any fall you wanted, your whole life.”