The Drawings Behind the Stop Sign

Tamsen did not look at me at all. She looked at a place on the ground just past my left shoe.

I stopped the traffic and stepped out into the road. I said, in the voice I use on children, “All right, walk.”

I did not say his name, and I did not look down. They went by me across the white lines, and I counted the steps to the far curb, because if I counted I did not have to feel them.

That was six school years ago. Kindergarten through fifth grade, about a hundred and eighty mornings a year, and a hundred and eighty afternoons. Every single time I kept my mouth shut.

You learn a child by the back of his head. I knew Braylin had lost his first front tooth before anyone told me.

On a cold October morning he crossed with his lips pressed together and his chin tucked into his collar like a spy.

I watched him get a green cast up to his elbow in the third grade, from a friend’s trampoline. I wanted so badly to ask which friend.

I held the paddle with an arm that had a little shake in it, and I counted the steps.

Once a week or so, around twenty to eight, a white bucket truck with the borough seal on the door came down Church Street on its way to a job. I knew who was driving it.

Corwin did not stop. He only lifted two fingers from the top of the steering wheel, the way a man does on a county road when he passes a neighbor he does not know well.

I would lift two fingers of my gloved hand off the paddle, the same way. That was six years of conversation with my only child. Two fingers, a stranger’s wave.

I would have told you I had a clear conscience. It was a lie I told myself with a straight face every morning.

The other children I loved without any trouble at all, and that is the thing I cannot get over. There was a girl named Annalouise who was afraid of the traffic, and I walked her across on my own arm for a month until she stopped trembling.

I kept granola bars in my coat for the ones with no breakfast. The school gave me a plaque, and I hung it in the kitchen and did not deserve it.

I was a good crossing guard and a coward of a grandmother, and I stood in one pair of shoes the whole time.

Braylin started the fifth grade in September, ten years old and taller than his mother’s shoulder. That first week he started doing something odd.

He had always walked up to the curb with the rest of Quarry Street and waited for my signal. Now, every morning, he stopped short, thirty feet before the corner, at the stop sign on the Quarry Street side.

He stood at the pole for a count of ten. Sometimes he crouched down like he was tying his shoe. His shoes had Velcro.

I watched for two weeks and decided he was dragging his feet so he would not have to come near me.