The Trunk I Set at the Far End

What Shanna Said

I found Shanna in the kitchen, running a rag around the inside of a roaster pan that was already clean.

She is thirty-one and she is lovely to look at, dark hair she keeps long, her mother’s cheekbones. She did not turn around when I came in.

She knew my step on that linoleum the same way I knew her handwriting.

“The sheet got reprinted,” I said. I kept my voice level. “Mick and Jo were on it. Now they’re not.”

“I redid the sheet,” she said, wringing the rag. “The old one was a mess. People were writing in the margins.”

“They were on it, Shanna. Jo wrote her own name.”

She set the rag on the edge of the sink and finally looked at me, and her face was calm the way still water is calm right before you find out how deep it is.

“It’s a church event, Brenda. For church families.” She said my name like it was a word she was being careful with.

“They’re your son’s kids. Kyle doesn’t come. They’re not really part of this.”

“They come with me every Sunday they’re here.”

“When they’re here.” She picked the rag back up. “I’m running it this year. Pastor Ray asked me to. It’s a lot of work and I get to decide how it goes, and I decided to keep it simple.”

Keep it simple. I have raised children and buried a mother and I know what people mean when they reach for a small flat word to cover a thing that is not small and not flat.

She meant the trunk-or-treat was hers. She meant my grandkids did not belong to her church or her night or her mother’s memory, and she had found a quiet way to put them outside the line.

I did not raise my voice. I have never once raised my voice to Shanna, not in the eleven years I have been married to her father, and I was not going to start over a roll of candy.

“All right,” I said. And I went home.

The Reason Nobody Said

Here is the part I did not say to Shanna in that kitchen, because saying it would have been a knife and I did not come to cut her.

The trunk-or-treat at Prairie Chapel was not always Shanna’s. It was Marie’s. Marie was Shanna’s mother, Dale’s first wife, and she started that parking-lot night back when Shanna was in pigtails, hauling bales out of the back of a feed truck and stringing orange lights off the tailgate before anybody in our county had heard the words trunk or treat.

Marie died of a cancer that took eighteen months to do it, and she died in the spring, and the first October after, Shanna ran the trunk-or-treat and cried the whole way through setup and nobody said a word about it because everybody understood.

That was nine years ago. Every year since, Shanna has run it. Every year she tapes up the same orange lights, which are Marie’s lights, the strand with the one bulb that flickers, and every year she stands at her trunk in her mother’s old denim jacket and hands out candy to children whose own mothers were in Marie’s Sunday school class.

I married Dale two years after Marie passed. I did not take anything from Shanna. I have been careful my whole marriage not to stand in a spot that was Marie’s, not at the stove, not at the end of the pew, not in the photographs on Dale’s hallway wall, which I dust and never move.

But Mick and Jo are new. They are my son Kyle’s children, and Kyle moved back to the county two years ago to drive gravel trucks for the quarry, and the kids started coming to church with me, and they are loud and sweet and they belong to me in a way that has nothing to do with Marie.

And I think that is the whole of it. I think Shanna looked at those two kids filling up the space beside me in the pew, the space where a family grows, and some part of her that is still eleven and still crying in a parking lot could not stand it.

So she kept the night simple. She kept it hers. She kept her mother’s lights pointed away from the two children who had no claim on them.

I understood it. Understanding a thing does not mean you let it stand.