The Camper by the Ballfield

I stood up. My knees told me about it. I am 64 years old and I have run the kitchen at the elementary school for twenty-two years, and there is not much left in my knees that I have not already used.

“You stay put,” I said. “I’m just going to talk to her.”

Shawna came out onto the back porch before I could knock. She had a coffee cup in her hand and her hair pulled up, and she looked tired. I will give her that. She looked tired before I ever said a word.

“Wilma,” she said. “I figured he’d call you.”

“He didn’t call me. He sent me five words and apologized for bothering me.”

She looked past me at Colter on the step, and something moved in her face, but she set it aside the way you set a hot pan on the stove.

“I know how it looks,” she said. “But you don’t know what it’s like around here with Kyle gone.”

My son Kyle was on a pipeline crew in North Dakota, out past Minot. Close to 600 miles from Powell. He had been gone since February, and he would not be home until the week of graduation.

The money was good, but it came in big checks with long gaps between them, and the house payment did not wait for gaps. I knew that. Everybody in our family knew that.

“Money’s short,” Shawna said. “Real short. There’s a lady on the internet who rents campers to people going through to Yellowstone. She said that one would get sixty dollars a night. Sixty, Wilma. That’s a light bill every weekend.”

“That one is where Colter sleeps.”

“He’s 17. He can sleep on the couch like everybody else did before he decided he needed his own house.”

“There’s no couch for him, Shawna. Your boys sleep on that couch half the time with the television going.”

“I already took a booking,” she said. “Memorial Day weekend. Three nights. A couple from Nebraska. I’m not giving it back.”

Memorial Day weekend was graduation weekend. Colter would have walked across that stage on a Sunday afternoon and come home to a couch he could not sleep on and strangers in the bed he made every morning.

I want to be fair to her, because the Lord asks it of me and because it is true. Shawna was not a monster.

She was a woman with two boys and a husband 600 miles away and a stack of bills on the counter.

But what she did was wrong. You do not put a child’s clothes in garbage bags.

You do not change a lock on a boy three weeks before the biggest day of his life and leave him a note signed with one letter. There is no amount of money that makes that right.

“I’m going to take him home with me for now,” I said.

“That’s fine. That’s probably best.”

That was all. I did not raise my voice. I did not tell her what I thought of her, though I had plenty to tell.

I walked back down the steps and picked up two of the trash bags, and Colter picked up the other two, and we put them in my trunk.

People have asked me since why I did not just call Kyle that minute. It is a fair question. I thought about it the whole drive home.