The boy across the street wouldn’t let ONE PERSON through his front door until a deputy pulled up and WALKED RIGHT IN.
I’m 88, and most weeks the only voice in my kitchen is the weather radio.
Walt has been gone nineteen years. My kids call on my birthday, if they remember it. The rest of the year the house just sits quiet around me.
Then Brody moved in across the street.
Eleven, all elbows, hood up in every weather, riding a beat-up bike in loops around the driveway like he had nowhere on earth to be.
He’d still be out there at nine, ten at night, long after the other kids had been called in.
I told myself he was just one of those independent ones.
I had it wrong.
Sunday, around two in the morning, crying woke me up.
Not loud. Nothing dramatic about it. Just a sound like something had already broken.
I got to the kitchen window and there he was on his front step in the cold, knees up under his sweatshirt, shaking.
IT WENT RIGHT THROUGH ME.
I pulled my housecoat on and went out on the porch. “Are you hurt? You need me to call somebody?”
He looked at me for maybe a second. “No, ma’am.” Then he was inside and the door slammed.
Monday he never came out. The bike lay on its side in the driveway, in the rain, right where he’d dropped it. He NEVER left that bike out.
No lights. No sound.
I baked a banana bread, which is what old women do with our hands when we’re scared, and carried it over and knocked.
NOTHING.
That quiet scared me worse than the crying had.
So I did a thing I’d never done in 88 years in Kokomo. I called the sheriff’s office.
I felt like a fool. The nosy old woman across the street. But I told the woman on the line all of it. “There’s a boy over there crying, and I haven’t seen one grown-up go in or out.”
Deputy Dietz came by around four. Big, slow-talking, the kind of man who makes you feel you didn’t imagine it.
He knocked.
Brody opened the door. White as paper. Hands going.
“Hey, bud,” Deputy Dietz said. “Is there a grown-up home with you?”
Brody’s mouth came open like the words were right there.
And then all three of us heard it.
SOMETHING CRACKED INSIDE THAT HOUSE. LOUD. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
The dresser against the back door
Deputy Dietz went past that boy so fast the storm door caught me in the elbow.
I stayed on the stoop with the loaf pan in both hands because that is what I had been holding and I could not think what else to do with it. From inside came a girl’s voice. Not crying. Talking, the way a little kid talks when she is explaining something and does not care whether anybody agrees.
Then Deputy Dietz called out that it was all right, nobody was hurt, stay where I was.
What cracked was a dresser. A tall one, four drawers, pressed wood, and it had been walked out of a bedroom and shoved flat against the inside of the back door in the kitchen. A girl of about four had climbed the drawers like a ladder to get at a box of cereal on top of the refrigerator, and the whole thing had gone over sideways into the stove.
There was a chair from the kitchen set on end on top of the dresser, too, wedged up under the knob, and a broom handle, and a laundry basket with two paint cans in it.
She was sitting in it when he got there. Cereal everywhere. One sock.
I could see them both through the front hall when he brought her out into the light. She had Brody’s chin. She had a marker line drawn up her arm.
Brody stood in the doorway with his back to me and said, “She climbs. I told her not to climb.”
The dresser weighed more than he did. He had gotten it in there somehow, on a floor with no rug.
The back door already had a bolt on it. I stood there on the step with my banana bread going cold and I could not work out the sense of it. Why would a boy drag a dresser across a house to hold a door that already locked?
Walt’s chair by the kitchen window
We bought this house in 1975, Walt and me, when Markland still had the drive-in on it. Fifty-one years I have looked at that pale yellow siding across the street.
The Pruitts had it first, then a couple who painted the shutters brown, then nobody for two years. In March a hatchback came with a mattress on the roof and a woman got out and stood in the driveway with her hands on her hips looking at the gutters.
Rhonda. She waved at me the first week and after that she was gone before I got the radio on and back after dark. Nights at the plant, somebody said at church.
Walt’s chair is still at the kitchen window because that is where the light is. I sit in it and I know things about that street I have no business knowing. I know the Ambroses’ dog. I know which recycling bin is whose by the dent.
So I knew, by April, that Brody rode the bike in loops and that every loop turned him back toward the road.
Not around the yard. Around the driveway, tight, thirty feet of concrete, so his face came back to the street every four seconds. I thought it was a boy with nowhere to go.
And I knew the trash. Tuesday is trash day here and has been since Walt was alive. Their can sat up in the carport week after week with bags stacked around it, and every Tuesday I would look at that pile and think, she works nights, she forgets.
There was a night in July I keep going back to. He was doing his loops and a car came up the street too fast and he was off that bike and standing in the grass before it passed the mailbox, holding the handlebars, watching it go all the way to the stop sign.
Then he got back on and rode another loop.
I thought: that boy’s been told about traffic. That is what I thought.
I never once saw Rhonda’s hatchback after the middle of August.
The bags in the carport
The last week of August I counted eleven bags.
That was the new thing. Not the bike, not the hours. Eleven bags and the can, and a boy who came out and stood on the front step at seven in the morning looking up the street both ways before he’d let the door shut.
I have lived alone long enough to know what a house sounds like when it is being run by somebody. There is a washer. There is a screen door twice a night. There is a car.
That house made no sound at all after eight o’clock, and the boy was always outside it.
I asked him about it. He was on the bike and I was at my mailbox in my housecoat, which is not a thing I am proud of. I said, “You want me to help you get that can down to the curb, hon? I can pull one end.”
He said his mom was going to do it Saturday.
“She back to days?”
“She’s on days,” he said, and he rode a loop and came around and I was still standing there and he rode another one.
I wrote a note that night. I have the pad Walt used for the feed store still, that is how careful I am with paper. I wrote that I was across the street, that I had a phone, that I made too much food for one person, and I signed it and put it in their mailbox.
The next morning the note was gone and the flag was down.
That was the Thursday. Nobody came over. Nobody called. And I told myself a woman on days doesn’t have time for the neighbor lady’s stationery, and I sat in Walt’s chair and watched that pile of bags in the carport get rained on.
Friday the porch light came on at their place at four in the afternoon and stayed on all night and all the next day. Nobody who is running a house does that. A kid does that, because his mother used to, and he does not know when.
Saturday night I heard a car door slam over there at eleven o’clock and I did not get up to look.
I have thought about that more than anything else in this whole business.
The Dollar General on Markland
Pam Doyle drives me Fridays. We do the bank and then the Dollar General because she likes their coffee and I am too cheap to argue.
I saw him in the second aisle with a plastic basket. Milk, the store bread, a jug of the orange drink, a bag of the little cheese crackers. Nothing a boy buys with his own money. He had a card and he had a fold of ones.
The card came back declined. I heard the girl at the register say it twice, the way they do, louder the second time, and Brody counted his ones out on the counter and put the milk back himself.
Then he took a piece of paper out of his hood pocket, unfolded it, read it, folded it and put it away.
I have looked at that motion a hundred times since.
Pam was at the coffee and did not see any of it. I got in her car with my one bag and I did not say anything until we were past the light at Boulevard.
In the car I said I thought I ought to call somebody. Pam went quiet for a mile and a half and then she said, “Call who? The county?”
I said maybe.
“They’ll take him,” she said. “And it’ll be you that did it. His mother will know it was you, and you have to live across the street from her.”
Pam has been my friend since the mill closed. She was not being cruel. She was being a person who has seen how these things go in this town.
So I did nothing. That was Friday. Saturday I did nothing.
Sunday at two in the morning I heard him crying on that step, and everything after that you already know: the Monday, the bike lying in the rain, the banana bread, the phone call I was ashamed of, Deputy Dietz’s cruiser at four o’clock.
And a dresser against a door that already locked.
Eleven days in Indianapolis
They ended up in my kitchen, all four of us, because Deputy Dietz asked if there was somewhere with the heat on and there was not, over there.
The little one — Kaylee — got the banana bread. She ate the foil-side end of it with her hands and told me about a show with a shark in it.
Brody sat with his hood up and his back not touching the chair.
I put the oven on low and left the door open because that kitchen over there had been cold since the Sunday, and the little one stood in front of it with her hands out like a woman at a barrel fire.
Deputy Dietz did not do any of the things I expected. He sat down. He put his hat on my table. He said, “You got a phone number for your mom, bud?”
And Brody took the paper out of his hood pocket.
It had been folded and unfolded so many times it was coming apart in the creases. A woman’s handwriting, ballpoint, pressed hard. The name of a hospital in Indianapolis. A phone number with the room extension circled twice. Under that: Ur aunt Charlene is coming Tues. Cereal is on the fridge. I love you both. Back before you know it.
Deputy Dietz read it and turned it over and there was nothing on the back.
“When’d she write this?”
Brody said a day. Deputy Dietz asked him what day of the week and Brody told him it was the day after the ambulance came, and then he said, “That was eleven days.”
Gallbladder, it turned out. Something went wrong after and it went into her blood and she was in a bed in Indianapolis with her phone dead in a drawer at that house because nobody knew to bring it.
Eleven days. And I had sat in Walt’s chair through nine of them counting garbage bags.
Deputy Dietz said, “So did Aunt Charlene come Tuesday?”
Brody looked at the table.
“She come at all?”
“At night,” he said. “She’s got a key.”
Charlene’s Sunfire in the driveway
She pulled in about six while Deputy Dietz was still on the phone to the hospital in my hallway. Gray Sunfire with a piece of trim gone off the bumper. I had seen that car in that driveway three times and never once in daylight.
She came across the street on her heels and she started before she was up my steps.
“Where are they? Are they in there? Brody! Brody, get out here.” Then to Deputy Dietz, who had come to my door with his phone still to his ear: “That’s my sister’s kids in that woman’s house. Who called you? Did she call you?”
He said his name and asked for hers.
“Charlene. Charlene Prewitt, I’m the aunt, I’m the emergency contact, it’s my name on the school card. I have been running myself ragged, I have got two jobs, I have been over there checking on him — ask him. Ask him if I been over there.”
Deputy Dietz asked him.
Brody said, “You came for the TV.”
She said that was not what happened. She said the TV was going in to get looked at. She said the microwave was hers from the start, she’d bought it, she had the receipt at home somewhere, and anyway Rhonda owed her four hundred dollars from the spring and everybody in this family knew it.
Deputy Dietz asked her about the card.
She talked for a while about that one. About how she was on the account to help, about how a person has to eat too, about how nobody hands you gas money to drive to Indianapolis and back. She said the word family maybe nine times. She said, “I’m not a criminal, I’m the one that showed up.”
Deputy Dietz let her get all the way to the end of it. He has a way of waiting that makes a person keep going past where they meant to stop, and she went past it. She told us she had been by Tuesday and knocked and knocked and that boy would not come to the door for her, her own blood, and what was she supposed to do about that, break a window?
“You have a key,” Deputy Dietz said.
She said the key didn’t work anymore.
“He put a dresser against the back door,” Deputy Dietz said.
That stopped her for one second.
Then she turned on me. She wanted to know how long I’d been sitting in that window. She wanted to know what kind of a woman calls the county on a family she has never had a conversation with. She said, “You could have knocked on the door, lady.”
I said, “I did.”
That is the only thing I said the whole time she was on my porch, and I have never in my life been so glad to have said something small.
A woman from the county came at ten that night. She was young and she was kind and she still put Brody and Kaylee in a car and took them to a foster home in Tipton, because I am eighty-eight and I am nobody’s blood and Charlene was not going to be allowed to have them and Rhonda could not sign anything yet.
Brody stopped at the bottom of my steps.
“Somebody’s got to bring the bike in,” he said.
Nine days they were in Tipton. Pam Doyle — who told me not to call — drove me down there four times, and she waited in the car with the radio on, and on the way home the fourth time she said she’d have called sooner than I did. Which is a lie. But she is my friend, and that is what she had to give me.
The bell
Rhonda came home the first week of October, thin as a rail, with a scar under her ribs she showed me like a receipt. She had been awake for four of those eleven days and she had spent them telling a nurse the number of a phone that was dead in a kitchen drawer.
She sat in my kitchen and cried and I let her, and then she asked me what I took in my coffee, and now she knows.
Charlene’s name is off the school card. There’s a hearing about the card and the TV that nobody has told me the end of, and I have decided I do not need to know it.
The bike is upright now. He leans it against my porch rail when he comes over, in the dry, under the eave, and the paint on the rail is going to be a problem eventually and I do not care.
Some mornings the weather radio is still the only voice in this kitchen. But most afternoons around four I hear two short rings out on the road, and that is a boy going by, and I get up out of Walt’s chair for it every time.
He put a bell on the handlebars in October. He rang it at my window and said, “That’s me. So you know it’s me.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has an empty house across the street and a chair by the window.
If you’re in the mood for more tales of lives unfolding, you might appreciate hearing about My Father Has Not Been Past That Cemetery Gate Since 2009 or even My Husband Cleaned Out His Drill Bits and Handed Me That Can in March.
