The Cabin I Took My Boy To

So I needed somebody to keep Tucker on the early mornings. School let out the last week of May.

Monday mornings my neighbor Megan took him along with her own two to the library summer reading club. That left Wednesday and Friday.

My mother, Rhonda Pickett, lived ten minutes from the hospital, on a gravel road off the highway outside Morristown. The plan was simple.

I would drop Tucker off on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he would sleep there, and I would pick him up on my way home from rehab.

When I asked her, she was quiet on the phone a long while.

Then she said, “I can do it. It’ll be two hundred a week.” She said it fast, like she had practiced it, and then she did not say anything else.

I want to be fair to her, because I did not understand it then. I thought it was a lot for a grandmother to charge.

But I knew Mama had been short since she married Dale Pickett three years before, and Dale’s hours at the plant had been cut twice. I said yes before she could change her mind.

So every Wednesday after rehab I handed her an envelope with two hundred dollars in it, two bills from the bank in Greeneville, and she folded it once and put it in the pocket of her housecoat without counting it.

For two weeks it seemed fine. By the third week he came home quiet. He would get in the car on Wednesday and look out the window the whole way.

When I asked about his night, he said, “Fine.” When I asked what they had for supper, he said, “Hot dogs.” When I asked if he had fun, he said nothing at all.

So there I was on my porch steps that Tuesday evening, with Tucker whispering into his grandmother’s cordless phone from her back hallway, and me holding my breath to hear him.

“Bud,” I said, “tell me what’s going on. You’re not in trouble. You hear me? Whatever it is, you’re not in trouble.”

“Grandma says I’m a baby.” His voice cracked on it. “I cried last night because I wanted you, and she said I was too old to be a baby about it, and Dale laughed.”

I felt that in my chest, and I do not mean my heart condition. I set my tea down on the step so I would not drop it.

“What else did she say?” I asked him, as calm as I could make my voice.

He breathed for a while. Then, very fast, the way kids tell you the thing they have been carrying for days, he said, “She told Dale you’re worthless. She said you’re lazy and you just like being laid up so everybody waits on you. Dale said you could work if you wanted to. Grandma said you always were lazy.”

“Tucker,” I said, “go get your backpack and your shoes. Put your toothbrush in the front pocket. I’m coming right now, and you wait for me in the front yard.”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, so small I barely heard it.

“No sir. Not one bit. I’m proud of you for telling me. That took a lot of nerve. Go get your things.”

I know what some people would have done. Called my mother right back and lit into her. Driven over there yelling.