Part 3 — Man At The Fence
The officer asked me about the house across the street, and I told him it had been empty for most of a year, ever since Mr. Dunlap moved to a care home. He walked to the front window and watched it for a long minute. A light had just come on in the upstairs bedroom. The officers went across the street together, and I held Jaden and counted every second.
They came back twenty minutes later with an old man between them. He was walking on his own, but slowly, and he held a gray cap in both hands. He stopped at my porch and would not come inside. Before anyone spoke, he looked at Jaden and said in a cracked voice, You have your fathers ears, son. Then he began to cry.
His name was Roy Whitaker, and he was seventy-four. He was the father of my husband, Marcus, who died in a car accident when Jaden was two. At the funeral, Roy and I had a terrible argument about the burial, with words that cannot be taken back, and he stayed away from us afterward out of shame. His wife passed two years later, and he had been alone since.
The man in the school pictures was the same Roy. He had driven to Waco every fall, stood by the fence at picture day, and waved at the camera because Gloria the photographer was the only person who ever smiled back at him. He wanted just one look at his grandsons face each year. That was all he had allowed himself.
This summer his doctor gave him news about his heart. He rented the empty house for a month from Mr. Dunlaps daughter. He started waving at Jaden from the gas station each morning, and Jaden, trusting and kind, waved back. On Wednesday he gave Jaden the photograph and asked him to hand it to me. Jaden tucked it into the proof envelope and forgot.
Some strangers are only grandfathers who have run out of courage.
The photograph of Jaden in his pajamas still frightened me, and I said so out loud. The officer agreed. He told Roy that watching a child from across the street at night, however kindly meant, was not acceptable, and he issued him a formal written warning and a notice to leave the rented house within the week. Roy accepted every word without looking up.
Gloria called me the next morning. She said she had noticed the man in the background of the pictures and had wanted me to see it for myself first, because she was afraid of calling the wrong family. I asked her how she had known to call. She said a photographer sees what is in the corners, and that she had a granddaughter of her own.
I did not forgive him that night, and I did not pretend to. But I called a family counselor at our church and asked her to help. Two weeks later we sat in a plain room with a table, a box of tissues, and a pot of coffee. Roy apologized to me properly. I told him that Marcus would have wanted this, and that Jaden deserved to know where his father came from.
The first visit was in the church hall with a volunteer sitting nearby. Roy had brought a battered black case from his attic. It was Marcuss old trumpet from high school. Jaden opened it slowly, ran his thumb along the dent in the bell, and played a wobbly scale. Roy covered his face with his hand.
Roy comes to dinner on Sundays now. He has his own chair, and he fixes our porch step with a hammer he keeps in his trunk. He sees a heart doctor every month, and he never misses a band concert. At next years picture day, Roy stood on the right side of the fence, in the front, with his arm around Jaden, and looked straight into the camera.