The Curb
Then I saw Lyle.
He was standing on the curb in front of the hardware store, by himself, with his hands in his jacket pockets. He was wearing a clean shirt. He had shaved.
He had come. I had not really believed he would.
All around him the town was clapping. People were cheering for the old red tractor and the old man driving it and the twenty-two kids walking behind a hay rack.
Lyle was the only one on that block who was not clapping.
People near him noticed. I could see it. A woman beside him turned her head and looked at him, and then looked back at the float, and then at him again.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Some of them knew. In a town the size of Ord, by Saturday morning, everybody knew.
Nobody said anything to him. They did not have to.
He was standing in the middle of a town that was cheering for the thing he had tried to take away, and everybody on that curb knew it, and so did he.
Kaycee saw him too. I watched her see him. Her hand stopped waving for a second.
Then she put it back up, and she did not look away from him. She did not glare. She just looked at her uncle and kept walking.
Dad saw him. He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on the street and his hands on the wheel and the throttle right where it was.
We came even with Lyle at a walk.
Lyle took his hands out of his pockets.
He did not clap. He did not wave. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking at the float, and at Dad, and at Kaycee, and his face was doing something I had not seen it do since we were young men.
At that moment, the wind came down Main Street from the west.
It caught the back corner of the float, where a strip of blue crepe paper had come loose from the chicken wire, and tore it free.
The streamer lifted in the air and floated sideways and came down in the street, right in front of the curb where Lyle was standing, and lay there in the sun.
The tractor kept moving. The float kept moving. Kaycee kept walking.
And Lyle looked down at that strip of blue crepe paper for a long moment, and then he stepped off the curb into the street, in front of the whole town, and bent down to pick it up.