The Trunk I Set at the Far End

Where the Line Went

By a quarter to six the line was at our tailgate and nowhere else.

I do not say that to crow. I am telling you what happened. The children had found the big bars and the hay-bale steps Mick let them climb and the pumpkins Jo let them touch, and the families followed the children the way families do, and the whole night slid down the length of that lot to the far end by the cedar.

Pastor Ray came down himself. He is a big calm man and he walked the length of the gravel with his hands in his pockets, taking it in, and he pulled his own car around and parked it right next to ours without a word to anybody.

He opened his trunk and it was empty except for a case of water and a folding chair, and he laughed at himself and set out the water bottles for the parents, and just like that the far end was the main end.

Miss Connie brought her crockpot of chili down on a hand truck and set it on Dale’s ramp. The Decker girls dragged two bales off Shanna’s display and rolled them down to make more steps for the little ones.

Nobody announced a thing. The whole trunk-or-treat just picked itself up off the near end of the lot and walked down to the cedar, the way water finds the low spot without being told.

“Didn’t see your name on the sheet, Brenda,” he said to me, quiet, while a dozen kids swarmed the bowls.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

He looked at me a good while. Pastor Ray has been doing this long enough to hear the whole shape of a thing in one short word.

“Marie used to park about right here,” he said. “Before we moved it all up by the hall. Right under this cedar.

Said the kids coming in off the road ought to hit the candy first and the sermon second.”

He smiled. “I’d forgotten that.”

I had not known it. I looked at that cedar tree and the dark road and I thought about Marie standing in this exact spot thirty years back with her orange lights, pointing them at the children coming in cold off the county road, and something in my chest that had been clenched all week let go.

I had not set up at the far end to take anything from Marie. I had set up here to stay out of her daughter’s way.

And it turned out I had parked my truck in the one spot in that whole lot that was most hers of all.