The man in the twelfth photograph was my son, Glenn, and he was wearing the green plaid shirt that I had bought for him at Christmas. I looked at his face in the little booking picture, at his tired eyes and the stubble on his chin, and I felt the floor of the police station tilt under my feet. The detective, Officer Hatfield, watched me closely. “Mrs. Gividen,” she said quietly, “I am sorry. Is this someone you know?” I could hardly speak. I whispered that he was my only child.
She gave me a cup of water and a seat by the window. I asked her to tell me what she knew. She said the photograph was from a year earlier, a minor arrest for a bad check, and that his name had come up because the boy with the candy bars had picked him from a lineup that morning. The boy said Glenn was the man in the white pickup. He had been given fifty dollars and told to stay a long time at the brick house with the beagle.
I could not make sense of it. Glenn had been a sweet little boy who brought me dandelions. He had lived in Louisville for years, working at a warehouse, and I had thought his troubles were behind him. Then I remembered the back door. Only my family knew it did not latch. Only my son had said he would fix it, over and over, for three years. And I remembered something else. He had called me three weeks ago to ask, very casually, whether I still kept my rings on the windowsill.
A mother knows the sound of her son lying before she knows the words, and she often refuses to listen until the day it is spoken aloud.
The detective did not arrest him that afternoon. She asked me if I would be willing to speak with him first. I said I would, and I drove straight home with my knuckles aching on the wheel. His white pickup was already parked at the end of my drive. He was sitting on the porch swing with his head in his hands, the very swing where the candy boy had drunk his lemonade, and Pete the beagle lay at his feet, wagging weakly. He looked up and said, “Mama, they found me.”
He confessed on the swing, in the late afternoon sun, with his hands hanging between his knees. He was forty six years old and owed a man in Louisville fourteen thousand dollars from a card game. The man had threatened him. Glenn had thought of my rings, the old watch of my husband, the silver in the dining room, and the plan had grown on him until it seemed like the only way.
He had paid the boy to look at the houses so that he would not have to knock himself. He had not yet come inside. He had sat in his truck every night for a week, ashamed.
I did not scream. I thought I would. Instead I sat down beside him on the swing and took his rough hand in both of mine. I told him that I had spent thirty five years as a school secretary, and I knew what a child looks like when he is carrying something too heavy. I told him he was still my boy. And I told him that he was going to go inside with me, call Officer Hatfield, and tell her everything he had just told me.
He did. Because he had not entered the house or taken anything, and because he came forward and named the man in Louisville, the prosecutor offered him a deal. He would plead to attempted burglary, attend a gambling treatment program in Owensboro, and make restitution to the boy and to the department of the sheriff for their time. The man in Louisville was arrested within the month for running an illegal game. The young boy, whose name was Tyrell, was placed in a youth program, and I sent him a card.
Glenn stayed with me for the six months of his program. He slept in his old bedroom. On the first Saturday, he got up before dawn, found a screwdriver in the toolbox of his father, and spent the entire day repairing the back door. He replaced the latch, the hinges, and the weather stripping, and painted the frame a cheerful white. When he finished, he called me over and said, with a small wavering smile, “It closes now, Mama. It really closes.” I locked it and unlocked it three times.
Tyrell came to see me in the fall. A counselor drove him out, and he stood on my porch with his hands in his pockets and a box of candy bars under his arm. They were real, from the grocery store, and he had paid for them with his own money from a job at a car wash. He said he wanted to apologize in person. I told him he could sit on the swing, and I brought lemonade. We drank it quietly, a woman and a boy, and Pete sat between us.