The Trunk I Set at the Far End

The Boy in Cardboard

They came down in twos and threes and then in a stream, and Mick jumped off his hay bale and started working the line like he was born to it, and Jo settled into handing out candy with both hands, and for a while I just stood back by the cab and let my grandkids have their night.

And then I saw the boy in the cardboard.

He was hanging back at the edge of our light, maybe seven, in a costume somebody had made out of a dish-soap box and a smaller box for the head, painted gray, two dryer vents for arms.

A homemade robot. You could see the duct tape holding the shoulders on.

His mother stood behind him with her hands twisted up in the hem of her coat, the way a woman stands when she cannot afford the store costumes and she is bracing for her boy to find that out.

I knew the look on her because I have worn it. I raised Kyle on a waitress’s money for a lot of years and I know exactly what it costs a mother to send her child into a crowd in a costume she sat up making at the kitchen table after he went to bed.

The boy was watching the other kids in their superhero suits and their blow-up dinosaurs, and he had gone still inside his cardboard the way children go still when they have decided not to want something.

I crouched down to Jo’s ear. “See that robot?” I said. “He’s the best costume here. You give him the biggest handful of anybody. And you tell him why.”

Jo marched straight over with both fists full of candy and dumped the whole load into his plastic pumpkin, more than any kid got all night, and she said it loud, the way six-year-olds say things.

“You’re a robot. Robots are the best. I wanted to be a robot but I didn’t know how to make one.”

That little boy looked down at his pumpkin pail full of candy and then up at his mother, and his whole cardboard body came back to life.

He said, very carefully, that his mom made it, that she used the real dryer vents and everything.

“Your mama’s got the gift,” I told her, and I meant it, and she pressed her lips together hard and nodded and did not quite cry, and I did not quite cry, and we stood there in the cold not crying together while our kids compared candy.

He went up and down that lot the rest of the night telling every grown-up that the lady at the far end said he had the best costume.

I heard him say it four times. That is the thing I will keep out of the whole night, if I am honest. Not the rest of it. That.