The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

The fellowship hall at Mount Hope Community Church was so full that night that Pastor Ward had to ask the Hendricks boys to carry in the folding chairs from the Sunday school rooms, and even then Dale and I ended up at the end of a table so close to the dessert line that I could smell the cinnamon on somebody’s apple crisp the whole supper through. Wyatt sat between us, picking at a plate of scalloped potatoes he hadn’t touched in ten minutes, and I remember thinking, the way you think a small true thing right before a big one, that my grandson had been acting strange for two months and I still did not know why.

Then Pastor Ward stood up at the front with his coffee in his hand and said he had an announcement before the pie got cut, and Dana Dermot stood up beside him with her husband Roy and their boy Micah, and the whole hall went quiet the way a room goes quiet when everybody already half knows what is coming and wants to hear it said out loud anyway.

“Some of you know our family had a hard fall,” Dana said. Her voice caught on the word hard. “The furnace went in September and we lost near everything upstairs, and a lot of you fed us and gave us clothes and I am never going to stop being grateful for this church.” She stopped and pressed her lips together and Roy put his hand flat on her back. “But something happened a few weeks ago that I have to say in front of everybody, because I don’t know how else to find out who did it.”

Beside me, Wyatt went very still. Not fidgeting anymore. Still the way a rabbit goes still.

“Micah’s school lunch account had gotten so far behind I was sick about it,” Dana said. “I didn’t know how far behind until the school called to tell me somebody had paid it off. All of it. A hundred and ten dollars, gone, paid in cash, and the woman in the office wouldn’t tell me who, because whoever did it asked her not to say.” She looked down at her son, who was twelve years old and wearing a new, too-stiff-looking canvas coat that still had the fold creases in the sleeves. “And three days after that a box showed up on our porch. A coat. Boots, his size exactly. Nobody rang the bell. Nobody left a name.”

I felt my grandson’s shoulders come up around his ears like a turtle going into its shell, and thirty seconds later, when Dana Dermot said the words I would have paid every dollar I own for her to never have had to say, I understood, all at once and completely, where two hundred and forty dollars of lawn mowing money had gone.