The Locker I Filled for My Son

It does not look that way from outside. It looks like a man alone in a cold room who has stood there so long he cannot remember what he came in for.

Vespera got sick in the winter of the fifth year. It was in the pancreas, and by the time they found it they said it had been there a good while.

She sat down across from me at the kitchen table with her hands flat on the oilcloth and told me.

She was sixty-one. We had been married thirty-eight years.

In May she sat up in bed one evening and said, “Alton, call him.” I said, “He knows the number.” She looked at me for a long time and said, “That is the stupidest thing you have ever said to me, and you have said some.”

I said, “I will call him when he calls me.” She said, “Then you will not call him, because he is as stubborn as you are, and he gets it from you.” She closed her eyes.

“I told him not to push. I may have been wrong about that.”

I did not call. I want to be plain about this, because I have been tempted to soften it. My wife was dying and she asked me for one thing.

It would have taken nine seconds, and I did not do it, because I had decided I was in the right.

On the last Sunday she was clear enough to ask for the steak.

I took the oldest package out of locker thirty-one and cooked it myself, badly, in her cast-iron pan, and carried it in on a plate.

She could not eat it. She looked at it and smiled and said, “That is a good steak.” Then she said the last thing she ever said to me about our son.

She said, “Someday that boy is going to put a plate in front of you, Alton. You had better have something ready to say that is not about the salt.”

I said I would. I said it the way you promise a thing you do not believe will ever be asked of you.

She died the last Friday in June, at four in the morning, with her hand in mine.

We held her service on a Monday, in the heat, with the Methodist ladies fanning themselves with the programs.

The church filled to the back wall and out onto the steps. I was walking down the aisle behind the casket when I saw him.

It was only the back of a head, in the last pew by the door, over a pair of broad shoulders in a black suit a little tight across the back.

A man looking at the floor. He had the same haircut Cleavon had always had, the same set of the neck.

I stopped, and the pallbearers nearly walked up my heels. By the time I had walked back up the aisle, the pew was empty.

I told myself it could not have been him. A man would have come up and said something. I think I knew, and I think I knew why he left.