The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

Gavin would not let me hug him. He stood in the doorway of his grandmother’s kitchen in his sock feet, ten years old, and he leaned back from me like I was something hot off the stove.

It was a quarter to six in the morning on the sixth day after the tornado. The sun was barely over the tree line behind Roberta’s place, and the generator was humming out by the carport.

“Mamaw says you care more about strangers’ lights than me,” he said.

He said it flat, the way children say a thing they have heard enough times to believe. He did not say it to hurt me. He said it because somebody had told him it was so.

Roberta Smoot stood at the counter with her coffee. She was sixty-six, my ex-husband’s mother, and she had the same straight back she’d had the day I married her son in the Baptist church on the highway.

She did not take it back. She did not even look embarrassed. She blew across her cup and looked at me over the rim.

“I only told him the truth, Josie,” she said. “You’ve been gone six days. He’s asked for you every night.”

I had ten minutes. I had driven twenty minutes out of my way to get those ten minutes, because I had not seen my son awake since Tuesday, and the crew was meeting at the pole yard at six-thirty sharp.

I knelt down in front of him. My boots left two dried mud prints on her clean linoleum, and I saw her see them.

“Buddy,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about you every hour.”

“Then why don’t you come home?”

“Because a lot of people don’t have a home to come back to right now. And the ones who do don’t have lights or water. That’s my job, baby. That’s what I do.”

He looked at his grandmother, and then at the floor. “Mamaw says that’s what Papaw said, too. And he was never home.”

I stood up. My knees cracked. Six days of climbing and sixteen-hour shifts will do that to you at thirty-nine.

I wanted to say a lot of things. I wanted to tell Roberta what it costs to hear your own child say a thing like that in somebody else’s kitchen. I wanted to ask her what she thought she was doing.

But I knew how that would go. Gavin would stand there between us and watch two grown women fight over him, and he would remember that longer than anything either of us said.

Arguing with Roberta would only have put my boy in the middle. So I said nothing. I kissed the top of his head, because he let me do that much, and I went out to my truck.

I sat in her driveway with the engine running and cried for about five minutes. Then I wiped my face on my sleeve, backed out past the generator, and drove to work.

The tornado came through on a Tuesday evening in May. It touched down south of the county line and stayed on the ground for nineteen miles, and it cut right across the north end of our town.

I was home with Gavin when the sirens went. We got in the hall bathroom with a mattress over us, and I held him while the whole house shook like a dog shaking off water. It lasted maybe forty seconds.