A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

Across the grass

That was when Kristy left her trunk.

She set her clipboard down on the sign-up table. She picked up her cauldron of candy, the big plastic one with the handle, and she stepped off the edge of the gravel and started across the grass.

Eli saw her first.

“Mom,” he said quietly. “Aunt Kristy’s coming.”

The line saw her too. A few of the parents moved aside a little to let her by, without anybody saying anything, the way you make room at a funeral.

Kristy walked straight past the line, to the bottom of the ramp, and stopped in front of Arnie.

She looked at her dad in his crooked cardboard helmet. She looked up at the castle her brother had built.

She looked at the gray stones that her nephew had pressed on with a kitchen sponge, one at a time.

Her face was red. Not angry red. The other kind.

“Dad,” she said.

“Kris,” Arnie said.

She didn’t say anything else to him. She looked up the ramp, at Eli in the window, with his helmet pushed up and his cousin Warren standing next to him and Pansy on the ramp behind.

At the window

Kristy did not go to the front of the line. She stepped to the back of it, behind a little boy dressed as a fireman, and waited her turn.

It took about six minutes. She stood there the whole time holding her cauldron.

I didn’t go to her. I wanted to, and I didn’t. This was not mine to fix. I stayed beside the castle where I was.

When she got to the bottom of the ramp, Arnie bowed to her. She looked at him for a long second.

Then she set her cauldron down on the grass and bowed back to her father.

She went up the ramp. Sixteen cleats. She was walking slowly. When she got to the top, she knelt on the deck beside Eli’s chair, so her eyes were level with his.

“Eli,” she said. “I was wrong.”

He looked at her. He didn’t say anything. He was seven, and he did not know what you were supposed to say when a grown-up said that.

“I was scared about the cars,” she said, “after what happened last year. I was so scared that I didn’t look at you. I looked at the chair. I’m sorry. I should have looked at you.”

Eli thought about it, the way he thinks about everything. Then he said, “You have to bow first. Everybody has to bow first. Those are the castle rules.”

Kristy laughed. It came out of her like a sob. She looked at me over his head.

Then she bowed to her nephew on the deck of his castle, all the way, with her floppy witch hat in her hand.

Eli leaned down and picked three peanut butter cups out of the bowl on the ledge.

He held them out to her. “I saved these,” he said. “Because you always take them out of Pansy’s bucket.”

Pansy said, “Mom! You do?”

Kristy took the peanut butter cups. She held them in both hands like they were something you’d put in a church offering. She could not say anything at all for a minute.