The Cabin I Took My Boy To

“Your husband told the men’s Sunday school class,” she said. “Men talk more than you think. I’m up at five anyhow. Bring that boy to my house on your way.”

I asked her what she would charge. She looked at me like I had said a dirty word. “I taught second grade for thirty-four years. I’m not charging anybody to keep one eight-year-old.”

I insisted. She refused. We settled, after some back and forth in that parking lot, on me bringing her a pound of the good coffee every week and Adam tilling her garden in the fall. She got the better end of it, and so did we.

Tucker went to Gwen’s on Wednesday and Friday mornings for the rest of the summer. She taught him to pick green beans and snap them.

She taught him to play rummy. She let him read on her porch swing and never once called him anything but “young man.”

The first morning I picked him up, he came out to the car carrying a paper sack of tomatoes and said, “Miss Gwen says I’m the best bean snapper she ever had.” He said it like he had been awarded something. I suppose he had.

Mama called three times in June. I did not pick up the first two. The third time, a Sunday afternoon, I sat out on the porch steps with the phone and answered.

She did not apologize. She asked how my heart was. She asked how Adam was.

She said she had been to the doctor for her knee, and that Dale’s hours had been cut again. She did not say anything about Tucker, and I did not either.

After ten minutes we said goodbye. I did not send her any money after that call. I did not send an envelope or a card or an explanation.

I had said what I needed to say on the dock, and Tucker had said the rest.

Adam was the one who said it plain, one night on the porch steps with the lightning bugs out. “She’s your mama. You don’t have to hate her. You just have to keep him safe from her until she figures it out.”

“What if she never figures it out?” I asked him. I had been afraid to say it out loud.

“Then you’ll still have kept him safe,” he said. “That part’s yours either way. The rest is hers.”

In July I finished my twelfth week of rehab. On the last morning Pat gave me a little certificate and a hug, and the old men on the treadmills clapped for me like I had won a race.

The first week of August, we went back to the state park. Tucker had asked about it every week since June. “Can we go back to our cabin?” he would say, like it was a place we owned.

On our second evening there, a little before dusk, Tucker and I were on the dock with our cane poles.

Adam had gone up to the cabin to start supper. I heard a car door shut up in the gravel lot and did not think anything of it.

Then I heard steps on the path, slow, the way you walk when your knee hurts. I looked up, and it was my mother.

She was alone. No Dale. She had on slacks and a blouse like she was going to church, and her hair was done, and she was holding her pocketbook in front of her with both hands. She stopped where the path met the dock.

Tucker saw her and went still. His hand found my knee and held on.