The Trunk I Set at the Far End

The Space Beside Me

Shanna came down last, after the line had thinned and the little ones had been carried off to bed and the big bars were gone.

She came down the length of the lot in her mother’s denim jacket with her arms crossed against the cold, and she stopped a few feet off from my tailgate, in the edge of my lights, and looked at the hay-bale steps and the nine pumpkins and Mick asleep sitting up against a bale with his cowboy hat over his face.

I braced for it. I am not going to tell you I did not.

She looked at the orange lights strung across my tailgate, every bulb burning steady, and I saw her throat move.

“Those aren’t Mom’s lights,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Mine. Marie’s are up on your trunk where they belong.”

Shanna stood there in the cold a long moment, and her face was not still water anymore. It was just a tired woman’s face, a woman who had run a hard night to hold onto her mother and had watched it walk down the lot to a spot she did not choose.

“Pastor Ray tell you,” she started, and stopped.

“He told me Marie used to park under this cedar,” I said. “I didn’t know that when I pulled down here. I swear to you I didn’t.”

And then I did the only thing I had left to do, which was the thing Marie would have done, which I knew because I had spent eleven years dusting her picture and never moving it.

I stepped back from my own tailgate and I made a space.

“There’s one bar left,” I said. “Full size. I was saving it. You hand it to the next kid that comes down.”

Shanna did not move for a second. Then a straggler came around the cedar, a little girl in a cat costume whose daddy had carried her in late off a long shift, and Shanna reached into my bowl without being told and crouched down and gave that child the last full-size bar with both hands, the way you give something that matters.