“Mama, does your tummy hurt when Shane gets home TOO?”
She was sitting on a stranger’s motorcycle in the kindergarten parking lot, SIXTEEN bikes in a row behind her, and if I got the next minute wrong she might never say it again.
“Say that again, Callie?” I said.
A month before, my biggest worry was getting a five-year-old to eat something green.
Shane and I had been together almost three years. He moved in the fall after our courthouse wedding, and inside a week Callie was calling him Papa Shane on her own.
He read meters for the electric co-op and was done by two, so when I closed at the feed store, he picked her up.
It never once bothered me. He acted like those afternoons were a gift.
Then the little things started. Callie jumping out of her skin when Shane dropped the cooler lid.
Callie asking for a lock on her bedroom door like the one on my phone. Small stuff.
The next week she wanted me reading her bedtime book, NEVER him.
Her tummy hurt every evening around six, about when his truck pulled in. I handed her the pink chewables.
Then a drawing turned up on the kitchen table. Crayon, the three of us, Shane’s hands solid black and big as windows, and Callie off in the yard with no mouth.
I held it up at supper. She lifted one shoulder and went back to her macaroni.
I decided I was making something out of nothing, because Shane had never given me cause.
He knew about her strawberry allergy, drove an hour for the purple light-up boots she begged for, and cried at her preschool graduation.
Then came Wheels Fest. She walked right past the fire engine to the bikes, and a gray-bearded man named Lyle lifted her onto his seat and held it steady.
A grandpa by the combine kept letting kids lean on its horn, and that’s when she asked.
I went hollow.
“Callie, is somebody hurting you, baby?”
She didn’t answer. She picked at the rubber grip.
“Shane calls it our secret game,” she said. “He says you’d cry if I ever told.”
My mouth wouldn’t work.
My fingers had gone numb on her jacket zipper.
“He said you’d go away AND IT’D BE MY FAULT.”
A truck door slammed out on the street, a door I’d know anywhere. Shane wasn’t due till noon.
Callie grabbed a fistful of my sleeve.
“Mama, please don’t be mad.”
Then his boots stopped on the asphalt right behind me, between the bikes.
11:42
It was Shane.
He had his co-op shirt on and the meter scanner still clipped to his belt, like he’d come straight off a route. He put one hand on my shoulder and the other flat on the back of the seat, an inch from Callie.
“Get a load of you, Cal. A REAL motorcycle,” he said.
Callie looked at the grip.
I stood up with her zipper still pinched in my fingers and lifted her off that seat onto my hip. She’s five and too long for it. Her boots knocked my knees, pink and blue against my jeans.
“Her tummy’s hurting,” I said. “I’m taking her to the doctor.”
“I’ll run her.” He reached for her. “You’ll lose your shift.”
“I’ve got her.”
His hand stayed out a second. Then it went in his pocket.
Lyle hadn’t let go of the bike. He’d told the kids he was sixty-two and had been riding since before their mamas were born, and they’d all stared at his beard like it might talk.
He looked at Shane and said, “Sir.”
That was all he said.
Shane gave him the laugh. It’s a good laugh. Half the porches in town have heard it, because he reads every meter in town and stops to visit at most of them.
“She’s had a rough week,” Shane said to Lyle, man to man. He tipped his head at me, not at Callie.
Then he bent and kissed Callie’s hair. She turned her face into my neck.
“I’ll grab supper on the way home,” he said. “Go get her looked at. I’ll let the office know she’s leaving.”
He walked off down the row between the bikes.
SIXTEEN of them, dusty and parked tight, a rider standing by most. A couple of them nodded at him. He nodded back like he’d known them for years.
The grandpa at the combine leaned on the horn again, and somebody’s toddler screamed at it. The horse trailer somebody had turned into a kettle corn stand was down to the burnt bags.
He didn’t go to his truck.
He held the front door of the school for a mom with a stroller and went in.
The purple boots
I buckled her into the booster seat in the back of my car, and her boots lit up every time she kicked.
Pink. Blue. Pink.
“Mama, are you mad?” she said.
“I’m not mad, baby. I promise.”
She kicked again. Blue.
He drove an hour for those boots.
It was last fall. She’d seen them on a commercial between cartoons and talked about nothing else for a month. The stores in our town didn’t carry them, and the farm store in the next town didn’t either.
Shane got off his route, didn’t even change his shirt, drove the hour to the Walmart in the next county and the hour back, and came in the kitchen door with the box under his arm like he’d shot it himself.
He’d bought them a size big so she’d get two winters out of them. He knelt on the linoleum, stuffed a sock in each toe, and laced them up. Then he went through the house and turned off every light, so she could stomp around in the dark and watch her own feet go.
I stood at the sink with my hands wet and thought, I finally picked right.
The house is a rental on the east end of town. The lease was in my name before Shane ever came along. He paid half the rent and the whole electric bill, and he fixed the back step without being asked.
That same fall Hal asked if I wanted the closing shifts at the feed store.
A dollar more an hour. I’d be the one counting the drawer and hosing off the dock at night. I’d been there eleven years, and it was the first raise Hal ever offered that came with a choice attached.
“Take it,” Shane said. “I’m done by two. She and me’ll have our afternoons.”
I took it. It came to about forty dollars a week.
The feed store sits out on the state road with a gravel lot and a loading dock and a bell on the door. Hal put a camera up over the register the spring somebody walked off with a case of dewormer. It’s the cheap kind that picks up sound, and some nights after close he’d play back old farmers arguing about rain and laugh till he had to sit down on a sack of oats.
At home I’d started chewing the pink tablets myself.
Two at a time, standing at the stove, right about when his truck turned in. Callie would watch me from the table and hold out her hand for hers.
I blamed Hal’s coffee.
We’d gotten married at the courthouse on a lunch hour. Shane’s cousin Wade stood up for us in his deputy’s uniform with his hat in his hand, signed the paper as our witness, and afterward bought us all chili dogs at the gas station across the square.
The lock was Callie’s idea. She’d watched me thumb the code into my phone a thousand times. She wanted a door like that. A door you needed the numbers for.
I’d laughed and told her she was too little for secrets.
In the back seat she’d gone quiet. I had both hands on the wheel and the car not started.
A knuckle tapped on my window.
Lyle was bent down to the glass with his helmet under his arm. I cracked it two inches.
“I wrote down what she said, ma’am,” he said. “Word for word. And the time.”
Wade Pruitt
He passed a raffle ticket through the gap. A red one, the PTA kind, with a number on the front.
On the back, in square pencil:
11:42. Girl on my bike. “Mama does your tummy hurt when Shane gets home too.” “Shane calls it our secret game.” “He says you’d cry if I ever told.” “He said you’d go away and it’d be my fault.”
Under that, his name, Lyle Brandt, and a phone number.
“The boys and me aren’t going anywhere till you pull out,” he said. “Take your time.”
He straightened up and walked back to his bike.
I folded the ticket into my back pocket. Then I called the sheriff’s office.
The woman who answered said she’d send someone out. Callie had my old phone in the back with a cartoon going and the sound turned all the way up.
A cruiser pulled in at the end of the row of bikes twenty minutes later, and Wade Pruitt got out.
The county has six deputies. They sent me the one who’d stood up at my wedding.
He came around to my back bumper and set his hat on the trunk.
“Hon, what’s going on?”
I told him Callie said Shane did something that made her tummy hurt. I told him she said Shane told her not to tell me.
I didn’t tell him about the game.
They were her own words, the only ones she’d picked out herself, and I wasn’t handing them to a man who’d bought me a chili dog in that same hat.
Wade looked at Callie through the back window. She was holding the old phone two inches from her face.
“They get things mixed up, that age,” he said. “Something on TV. Something some kid at school said.”
“She said Shane.”
“I hear you.” He already had his phone out. “Let me just give him a call. Hear his side.”
“Wade, don’t.”
He was already walking back to the cruiser.
I stood at the bumper with my hand on the trunk where his hat had been.
Lyle stood two cars down beside a black bike, helmet under his arm, far enough off he couldn’t hear and close enough he could see. The rest of them stayed by their bikes. They’d started packing up a tent at the far end, slow, the way you do when you’re stalling.
Wade came back in four minutes. He’d been laughing at something on the phone. The end of it was still on his face.
“Shane says her stomach’s been bad since spring,” he said. “Says he’s the one keeps buying the medicine. He’s worried about you, hon. Not her.”
“About me.”
“He said you’d probably call somebody today.” He turned his phone around so I could read it. “He sent me this a while back. I didn’t think anything of it.”
The text was three weeks old.
She’s having her spells again. Don’t say nothing to her. Keep it between us.
The sign-out binder
I’ve never had a spell in my life.
I’ve had the flu. I had a cow step on my foot on the dock one year and drove myself to urgent care with my boot in the passenger seat. That’s the list.
Wade told me to go on home and let things cool off. He put his hat back on and said Shane was a good man and I knew that.
Then he left.
I called my sister from the driver’s seat. Deb works nights at a nursing home ninety miles east, and she was asleep, and she picked up on the fourth ring anyway.
“Something’s wrong with Callie,” I said. “I can’t go home.”
I heard her feet hit the floor. “I’m getting in the car.”
I got Callie out, set her back on my hip, and walked to the front door of the school. Lyle walked about ten feet behind us, stopped on the sidewalk, and stayed there with his hands in his vest.
Joyce has had the front desk since I was in kindergarten myself. She gave me Dum Dums out of the same jar.
She looked at me over her glasses like she’d been expecting me.
“Oh, hon. Shane was just in here. He’s worried sick.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said you haven’t been right since spring. He said if you came in wound up, give him a call.”
Her hand was on the desk phone. It was ON the phone.
“Joyce. I want to see the sign-out book.”
She didn’t move for a second. Then she slid a green binder out from under the counter and turned it around to face me, because I’m the mother on the card, and Joyce does what the card says.
Each page was a day. Name, time out, reason, signature.
I went back a week. Then two.
CALLIE. 11:30. Appt. S.
Square capitals. I’d know them off a grocery list.
CALLIE. 11:35. Appt. S.
Kindergarten lets out at 3:10. He’d told me a hundred times he grabbed her at the bell and they stopped for a slushie on the way home. Blue raspberry. She always had a blue tongue when I walked in.
I put my finger on the lines and counted. I lost track the first time and had to start over from the front of the binder.
Thirty-eight.
Each one on a day I closed. Hal tapes the schedule up by the time clock every other week, and I know my closes the way I know Callie’s shoe size.
Appt. Appt. Dentist. Family. Appt.
Callie has never been to a dentist. Her first appointment is the Monday after Christmas. It’s written on the calendar on my fridge in my handwriting, because I’m the one who makes every appointment in that house.
The line for today was at the bottom of the page, the ink still shiny.
CALLIE. 11:50. Mom not well. S.
“I need copies,” I said.
Joyce made them. She held them out to me with both hands, like a casserole.
“I thought it was the sweetest thing,” she said. “A daddy who takes his girl out of an afternoon.”
I didn’t answer her. Callie had her face in my hair and her boots going pink, blue, pink against my hip.
“Hon,” Joyce said. “He said you knew. He said it was your idea.”
The pink chewables
I couldn’t take her home. Shane’s truck would be in our drive by supper with a sack of food and that laugh.
So I took her to the feed store.
Hal was at the counter with the paper. He looked at my face and at Callie’s and folded it.
“I need the back till my sister gets here,” I said. “I’d rather you didn’t call anybody.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
He found Callie a scoop and a bucket of cracked corn and let her fill the little paper sacks we sell for the duck pond in the park. She’s always liked that job. Then he went out on the dock to load a man’s truck and left us alone.
I went behind the register for a pen.
My roll of pink chewables was right where I keep it, by the receipt paper. I set it on the counter without thinking.
Callie stopped scooping.
She looked at the roll. Then at me.
“Mama, is your tummy hurting now?” she said.
“A little.”
“Shane said it would.”
I came around the counter and got down on the floor with her in the corn dust.
“Said what would, baby?”
She poured corn into a sack one piece at a time, the way she does when she’s working something out.
“He said your tummy hurts TOO. When he gets home. He said you play it too, and you take the pink ones and you don’t ever cry and you don’t ever tell.” She folded the top of the sack over. “So I’m big like you.”
I couldn’t get my breath to go all the way down.
“Baby, is that why you asked me? On the motorcycle?”
She nodded at the corn.
“I wanted to see if he does it to you,” she said. “I didn’t want you being by yourself with it.”
I picked up the roll of chewables off the counter and dropped it in the trash can under the register.
“Shane doesn’t hurt my tummy,” I said. “He doesn’t play anything with me. I just drink too much of Hal’s coffee.”
She looked at the trash can for a while.
“Can I have a pop? Shane lets me have pop before supper on our afternoons.”
I got her one out of Hal’s machine. She drank half of it and set it on a sack of chick starter and didn’t touch it again.
Deb pulled into the lot a little before half past two with her scrub pants still on. She looked at me over Callie’s head and didn’t ask me one thing. She just held out her arms.
I watched the car till it turned at the elevator.
Then I called Shane.
“Come by the store at close,” I said. “Six. We’ll talk where she can’t hear.”
“Atta girl.” I could hear his blinker going. “I’ll bring supper. You want the chicken?”
“The chicken’s fine.”
Then I called Wade.
“You wanted his side,” I said. “Six o’clock, the feed store. Come in the back and stand where he can’t see you.”
“Hon, I can’t just—”
“Wade, you called him for me. Come hear him for me.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear his radio in the background.
“I’ll come,” he said. “I’m not hiding behind a damn thing, though.”
I texted Lyle the name of the store and the time. That was all.
He sent back two words. Elevator lot.
I propped the back door open with a salt block at 5:40 and switched off the OPEN sign.
The mineral blocks
Wade came in the back at 5:52.
He stood behind the pallet of mineral blocks by the dock door with his arms crossed, looking at the floor. He’d kept his hat on.
On the other side of the road, in the gravel by the grain elevator, the bikes came in two at a time and backed into a line facing the store.
I counted them by twos, the way I count the drawer.
SIXTEEN. Same sixteen. The riders sat on them with the engines off, like they were waiting on a parade to come down the state road.
Hal stayed in his office with the door open a crack.
Shane pulled in at six on the dot. He sat in the truck a minute looking across the road. Then he came in with a sack of fried chicken and set it on the counter by the register, right under the camera.
“Got your buddies from the school out there,” he said. “Call them yourself?”
I didn’t say anything.
“She at Deb’s? You called Deb.” He started taking the boxes out of the sack and lining them up. “Babe. Come on. I know you, you haven’t eaten all day. Sit down.”
I stayed standing.
“I’ve been carrying this since spring,” he said. “I told Wade. I told Joyce. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you embarrassed. Walking around that kitchen at six o’clock like somebody died. Chewing those pink things like candy. She WATCHES you. She soaks up everything at that age.”
He came around the end of the counter.
“And whatever she said today. Sure, we’ve got a game. A surprise for your birthday. I’ve been teaching her to keep a secret for her mama. And the game’s all it is. ALL it is.”
“I never told anybody she said game,” I said.
He stopped.
“I didn’t tell Wade. I didn’t tell Joyce.”
Shane laughed. It came out wrong, too high, like a belt slipping.
“Bull. Wade knows.”
“Wade,” I said.
Wade came out from behind the mineral blocks. He didn’t uncross his arms.
“She never said one word to me about any game, Shane,” he said.
Shane looked at him a long time.
Then he turned and put both hands flat on my counter between the chicken boxes, and leaned in, and dropped his voice to almost nothing.
“Do this, and you’re the one goes away,” he said. “I’ve got three weeks of texts. I’ve got Joyce. I’ve got thirty-eight lines in that binder and you never said a word about one of them, so as far as anybody’s concerned, you knew. A woman with spells, against the man who reads every meter in this town? They’ll have her off you by winter.”
He leaned closer.
“AND IT’LL BE YOUR FAULT.”
I took Lyle’s raffle ticket out of my back pocket and laid it on the counter between his hands, words up.
“11:42,” I said. “That was before your truck door.”
He read it. He read the name at the bottom.
“The hell is Lyle Brandt?”
I looked out the front glass. He looked where I looked.
On the other side of the road, sixteen men sat on sixteen motorcycles, and the one at the near end lifted two fingers off his handlebar.
Hal’s office door opened.
“Camera up there’s got sound, Shane,” Hal said. “Always has. Ask any of the old boys I’ve played it back for.”
Wade uncrossed his arms.
“Turn around, Shane.”
“Wade.” Shane looked at him. “Wade, you stood up at my wedding.”
“I know where I stood.”
He walked Shane out the front with one hand on his elbow. The bell on the door rang behind them. The chicken stayed on the counter.
On the other side of the road the riders got up off their bikes and stood beside them, all sixteen. They stayed on their side and didn’t say a word. Shane looked at them the whole way to the cruiser.
Hal got the step stool out and climbed up and popped the card out of the camera. He took it out to Wade at the cruiser door and came back in rubbing his hip.
I took the store key off my ring and set it by the register.
“Keep your key,” Hal said.
“Shane reads your meter, Hal,” I said. “He reads everybody’s.”
Deb’s driveway
It was five weeks before Lyle rode out.
Ninety miles, him and two others, on a cold bright afternoon with the leaves coming down. They parked in Deb’s gravel driveway and took their helmets off, and Deb brought out coffee in the mugs from her work.
Callie came out the front door at a run.
She has white sneakers now, from the dollar store where I stock shelves three nights a week. My hands smell like cardboard instead of oats. The calendar with her dentist appointment on it is still on the fridge of the house on the east end, and the landlord kept my deposit because I never gave notice.
Deb’s spare room has a lock on the door now with a keypad. Callie picked the code. It’s 5555, and she tells it to everybody. The mailman knows it. The lady who does Deb’s hair knows it.
She’d told the other thing once more, to a woman in a cardigan in a room with a dollhouse two counties over, while I sat in the hall with a vending machine coffee. Then she asked for a sticker and got two.
Wade drove the camera card and Lyle’s ticket and Joyce’s copies to the county seat himself. He calls every couple of weeks to tell me where it’s at. He calls me hon less.
Lyle lifted Callie onto his seat and held it steady.
She didn’t pick at the grip. She put her thumb on the horn button and looked at him, waiting.
Then she looked at me.
“Mama, does your tummy hurt?” she said.
“I’m good, baby.”
“I’m good TOO.”
She leaned on the horn, and Lyle let her.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who stands in a school pickup line every afternoon and knows every face in it.
For more stories about navigating the tricky world of childhood and its challenges, read about my daughter’s note that said “DONT BE MAD.” Court started in fifty minutes, or the time I reported her daddy, and her mother already had him barred from the house. You might also appreciate the day Jacob said the janitor wanted to know whether I drive the ambulance.
