The Hall Light Left On for Teague

The light

He went to bed at ten, in the little room at the end of the hall, under the quilt Ferris’s mother made. The top drawer of the dresser still held his socks, a few of them mismatched. I had never moved them.

I washed the supper dishes and wound the kitchen clock. I stood on the back porch under the cold stars and listened to the pecans coming down on the shed, and I tried to say a prayer. There was too much of it. In the end I just said, “Thank you,” out loud, to the dark.

Then I went down the hall.

The light was on, of course. I stood under it in my nightgown, looking at his closed door and listening to the slow breathing of a person who is finally somewhere safe.

I reached up and put my hand on the switch. I do not know what I meant to do. I think I had a notion that now he was home, it might be time.

“Granny.”

He had opened the door. He stood there in an undershirt and old gym shorts, his hair mussed, looking seven and nineteen and twenty-six all at once.

“You can turn it off now,” he said gently. “If you want. It’s all right. I’m home.”

I looked at him. I looked at the forty-watt bulb that has been changed eleven times and has kept watch over every night of that boy’s life since a May evening nineteen years ago.

“Teague Wofford,” I said. “Did I not tell you? As long as you live in this house.”

He was quiet. Then, slowly, he gave me the first full smile of the whole day.

“Then I guess it’s staying on.”

“I guess it is.”

He kissed me on the forehead, the way you would a child, and went back in. I heard the bedsprings, and I heard him let out one long breath.

At ten after five the next morning, I poured two cups of coffee. I set one in front of my chair and the other across from me, in front of the chair with the cane seat.

At a quarter past, the bedroom door opened down the hall, and Gus slapped his tail twice against the linoleum.

Teague came into the kitchen in his bare feet, sat down, and picked up the cup. He drank it hot, while it was still steaming.

“Best coffee in Mississippi,” he said.

“It is the same coffee,” I said.

“Yes ma’am. That’s what makes it the best.”

That week I took the calendar down off the icebox and laid it in the drawer with the dish towels, where we keep useful things. I did not need it anymore. He was home.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.