The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

Sunday

He came on Sunday.

Elsa cleaned a house that was already clean and made a pot roast, his favorite, and then stood in the kitchen with a wooden spoon and told me she did not know if he would eat it. I told her he would.

They said two o’clock. At one-fifteen I went out and stood on the porch. At one-thirty I went in and came out again. At ten to two a gray pickup with Texas plates stopped at the end of the driveway and sat there with its engine running for a long time.

I am sixty-seven years old, and I had never in my life been as afraid as I was walking down those porch steps.

He got out of the truck. He was forty-one, with gray at the temples and big through the shoulders, the way a man gets who has lifted things for a living. He stood at the end of the driveway with his hands at his sides. Then the passenger door opened and a little girl got out, a braid down her back, a yellow coat, and she took his hand.

She looked at me with his exact eyes.

I did what I should have done on the loading dock eleven years ago.

“Tobin,” I said. “I was wrong. I did not ask you why, and I should have. I should have asked you in the office with the door shut. I have said your name out loud every Saturday for eleven years, and I have never once said it to you.”

His jaw was working. He said nothing.

“Tell me now,” I said. “If you want to. I will not say a word until you are done.”

My son looked at me a long time. Then he said, “Dad, I took the money for her.” And he put his hand on the little girl’s head.

“I know,” I said. “I know you did.”

He told me anyway, standing in the driveway with Junie leaning against his leg. The plastic box and the chair and the weeks. What it is to stand in a hospital hallway and know the only man who could help you is the one you cannot call. I listened. Elsa had come out on the porch with both hands over her mouth. And Junie, who is eleven and does not know any better, walked right up to me and looked up.

“Are you the one who says my daddy’s name?”

I could not speak.

“Grandma told me on the phone,” she said. “She said you say it every Saturday in the feed store, and God hears it.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I do.”

“Then He knows him already,” Junie said. “So you can stop worrying.”

I knelt down on the concrete of my own driveway, sixty-seven years old with a bad knee, and put my arms around my son’s daughter. My son knelt beside her and put an arm around me, and for a while there was nothing in the world but the three of us on the concrete and Elsa’s pot roast smelling through the screen door.

He did not forgive me that day, and I will be honest about that. “Dad, I do not know yet,” he said. He said he had come because his mother asked, and because Junie wanted to see the store. He said forgiveness was something he would have to walk toward the way I had walked toward the jar, one Saturday at a time.

I said that was fair. I said I would be there for every one.

But he stayed for dinner. And after dinner, Junie asked to see the jar.