The kid is staring at me from across the laundromat and I can’t breathe.
He’s maybe eight years old, sitting on top of a dryer with his sneakers dangling, and he has Caleb’s EXACT EARS. The small ones, slightly pointed at the top. The ones I used to cup in my palms when I kissed my son goodnight.
—
Four months earlier, I was still sleeping on the couch.
—
My name is Dennis Pruett. I’m forty-five years old and I work nights at a freight depot in Akron, which means I’m usually asleep by the time the sun comes up and awake by the time the world goes dark. That’s how I liked it, after. Less people. Less light. Less of everything that reminded me that Caleb had been gone for two years and I still hadn’t moved his Iron Man backpack from the hook by the door.
My wife Sandra left eight months after the accident. I don’t blame her. She said I’d turned into a locked room, and she wasn’t wrong. I just couldn’t figure out how to unlock myself from the inside.
I started going to the laundromat on Route 9 because our washer broke in January and I couldn’t make myself care enough to replace it. It was open until midnight. Nobody asked you anything. You could sit in a plastic chair and watch your clothes spin in circles for an hour and nobody thought that was strange.
Then I started noticing the boy.
He wasn’t there every week. Maybe every other. Always with a woman I assumed was his grandmother – white-haired, deliberate in her movements, the kind of woman who folds fitted sheets perfectly. The boy would sit on the machines and draw in a spiral notebook while she sorted clothes. He never made much noise. He just existed in that space like he’d always been there.
The first time I really looked at him was a Tuesday in March. He’d dropped his notebook and it slid under my chair, and when I picked it up and handed it back to him, he looked at me with these dark, watchful eyes and said “thank you, sir” without any prompting. Caleb used to do that. Sandra had drilled it into him so hard it became reflex. Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am. Like a little diplomat.
I told myself it was nothing. Kids say thank you. Kids have small ears.
A few days later I went back on a night I didn’t need to. I told myself my work shirts needed a second wash. I sat in the same chair. They weren’t there.
The week after, they were.
I watched the grandmother more carefully that time. She moved through the laundromat like she owned it, but there was something careful about the way she kept the boy in her peripheral vision. Not anxious. More like – practiced. The way you watch something precious that you’ve already lost once.
That’s when I started to feel it. Not grief exactly. Something older and stranger underneath the grief.
The boy drew in his notebook the whole time. Before they left, he looked up at me across the row of machines and held up the notebook. He’d drawn the laundromat – the rows of round windows, the orange plastic chairs – and in one of the chairs, a man sitting alone.
The grandmother put her hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the door without looking at me.
I sat there until midnight when they locked up.
—
It’s a Thursday in April now, and the boy is staring at me, and I cannot breathe.
The grandmother is at the far end of the machines with her back to me. The boy has his notebook open but he isn’t drawing. He’s watching me with those dark eyes and Caleb’s EARS and a small scar on his chin that I don’t recognize but that sits in the exact spot where Caleb had a birthmark the size of a pencil eraser.
I stand up. I don’t know why I stand up.
The grandmother turns around.
She looks at me for a long moment – not surprised, not afraid – with the specific expression of someone who has been waiting for a thing to happen and is watching it happen now. She reaches into her coat pocket and takes out an envelope. It’s already open. She’s carried it so long the edges have gone soft.
She walks toward me slowly and holds it out.
“I think,” she says, “you need to see who this child’s father was.”
What Was in the Envelope
My hands are not steady when I take it.
Inside is a photograph. Wallet-sized, the kind that comes from one of those strip booths at the mall. Two teenagers. A boy and a girl, maybe sixteen, seventeen. The boy has his arm around the girl and they’re both laughing at something outside the frame. He’s wearing a Cavs jersey, number 23. His ears are small and slightly pointed at the top.
I know that boy.
Not personally. But I know the face the way you know something that’s been living in your house for years. The jaw. The set of the eyes. The particular way the smile goes a little crooked on the left side.
That’s Caleb’s face. Not Caleb – Caleb was seven when he died, this kid is a teenager in the photo. But the resemblance is the kind that makes the room tilt.
I look up at the woman.
“My name is Ruthanne Hollis,” she says. She doesn’t extend her hand. She just stands there like she’s braced for something. “That boy in the photo is my grandson Marcus. He passed three years ago. Car accident, up on 77.” She pauses. “He was nineteen.”
I don’t say anything. I’m still looking at the photograph.
“The child,” she says, nodding toward the boy on the dryer, “is Marcus’s son. His name is Theo. His mother is not in the picture.” Another pause, longer this time. “I’ve been raising him since he was four.”
I finally look at her. “Why are you showing me this?”
She takes a breath that seems to cost her something. “Because Marcus’s father – his biological father, not the man I was married to – his name was Robert Pruett. He grew up on Clearfield, over by the old Sears. He and my daughter were together for about six months in 1986.” She watches my face. “I think you might know that name.”
Robert Pruett of Clearfield Avenue
I did know that name.
Bobby Pruett was my older brother. Seventeen years older than me, gone from the house before I was old enough to form a real memory of him. He died of a heart attack in 2009, down in Columbus where he’d been living. No wife. No kids, as far as any of us knew. Our mother went to the funeral and came back quiet in a way she stayed for about a year.
I hadn’t thought about Bobby in a long time. You don’t, when someone’s been gone that long and left so little behind.
I sat back down in the orange plastic chair. Ruthanne sat in the one next to me, which I noticed she didn’t ask permission to do. Theo watched us from across the room, still not drawing, his sneakers still dangling.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“About you specifically? A few months. Marcus always knew he had a biological grandfather somewhere on his father’s side. He looked into it some when he was older. He found an obituary for Robert Pruett, found some family connections. Found your name.” She folded her hands in her lap. “He never reached out. I think he was working up to it when he died.”
Three years ago. Marcus died three years ago, working up to something he never got to do.
I know how that goes.
“And Theo,” I said. “Does he know any of this?”
“He knows his daddy had family he never met.” She looked at the boy, that practiced watching. “He doesn’t know the details. He’s eight.”
Eight years old. Sitting on a dryer in a laundromat on Route 9 at ten-thirty on a Thursday night, drawing pictures of strangers in chairs.
What I Should Have Said
I should have been careful. That’s what a reasonable person does in this situation. You say, let me think about this, let me make some calls, let me verify what you’re telling me before I sit here and feel things I’m not equipped to feel.
I didn’t say that.
What I said was: “What does he like to draw?”
Ruthanne looked at me for a second. Something in her face shifted, just slightly. “Everything. Buildings mostly. He wants to be an architect. He told me that when he was six.” A small sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Six years old, says he wants to be an architect. I didn’t even know he knew that word.”
Caleb had wanted to be a garbage man. He’d been firm about it. He liked the truck. Sandra and I had both bit our cheeks bloody trying not to laugh when he said it with complete seriousness at the dinner table, age five, like he was announcing a career decision at a board meeting.
I told Ruthanne that.
I don’t know why I told her that. It just came out.
She didn’t laugh either. She just nodded slowly, like it was information she needed.
“Theo,” she called across the room. “Come here a minute.”
Theo Hollis, Eight Years Old
He hopped off the dryer. Landed clean, no stumble. Walked over with his notebook tucked under his arm and stood in front of me with those dark watchful eyes and waited.
“This is Mr. Pruett,” Ruthanne said. “He’s going to sit with us for a little while.”
Theo looked at me. “You were here last week,” he said. “And the week before. You always sit in that chair.”
“I do,” I said.
“Why?”
I thought about it. “It’s a good chair.”
He considered that. Then he opened his notebook and showed me the page he’d been working on. It was the laundromat again, but more detailed this time. He’d added the coin machine by the door, the corkboard with the flyers on it, the crack in the tile near the third dryer. And in the chair by the window, the same man. But this time the man had a face.
I didn’t ask him when he’d drawn it. I didn’t ask how he’d gotten the jaw right, the way my shoulders hunch when I’m sitting still.
I just looked at it.
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“I know,” he said. No ego in it. Just fact.
Ruthanne made a sound next to me. I think it might have been the closest she’d come to laughing in a while.
What Happens Now
I don’t know.
That’s the honest answer and I’m not going to dress it up. I’m forty-five years old, I work nights, I sleep on a couch in a house with a dead child’s backpack on the hook by the door and a washer I still haven’t replaced. I’m not in any condition to be useful to anyone.
But I gave Ruthanne my phone number before she left that night. She wrote hers on a page she tore from Theo’s notebook, and Theo watched her do it with the expression of someone who already knew this was going to happen and had simply been waiting for the adults to catch up.
She said she’d call. I think she will.
I drove home on Route 9 with the photograph on the passenger seat. Bobby’s face, age sixteen, laughing at something outside the frame. The Cavs jersey. Those ears.
I got home at eleven-forty. I stood in the hallway for a long time looking at the Iron Man backpack on the hook.
Then I went to the closet and got out the box I’d put together eight months after the accident and never opened. The one with Caleb’s drawings in it. The buildings he’d sketched with fat crayons, the crayon lines going outside the edges because he didn’t have the patience to stay inside them.
I sat on the floor with the box open in my lap until the sun came up.
I didn’t sleep.
But I didn’t close the box either.
—
If this one got you, pass it along to someone who needs it tonight.
If you found this story compelling, you might also like to read about A Woman on the Bench Who Said My Dead Daughter’s Name Before I Could or discover what happened when My Wife Answered the Door in a Robe, But It Wasn’t Our Apartment.
