My six-year-old wanted to know why Mr. Buck only visits the house after I fall ASLEEP.
I have never known a single Buck.
NOT ONE.
It has been the two of us since the papers went through, in a rented duplex behind a motorcycle shop in Hollis Bend, and I take the overnight shifts because the overnight shifts cover the rent.
Delia is six, careful and dreamy, the kind of kid who apologizes to the furniture when she bumps it.
So the first time that name came up over cereal, I kept spreading jam on my toast.
“He says you’re tired all of the time,” she told me over her bowl.
I asked her who said that.
“Mr. Buck,” she said, and went back to her spoon.
An invented friend, I figured. Kids build those out of nothing.
Nine days after that I was working the tangles out of her hair before bed, and she found my face in the mirror and asked why he only comes while I am sleeping.
My hands stopped.
“At night,” she said, like I was the slow one. “He checks on me, and then he goes.”
Something went cold under my ribs, and I told her NOBODY comes into this house after we go to bed.
“Yes, there IS a Mr. Buck,” she said, and pulled the blanket up to her chin.
I sat on the end of her mattress until the window went gray.
In the morning I checked every latch TWICE and the back door after that.
It didn’t help.
I asked her what he looks like.
“Old,” she said. “He smells like the shop. He walks slow, the way Milton walks.”
Milton has run the garage under us for thirty-one years, and eleven riders park in that lot every Friday, and all of them have known Delia since she rode in a car seat.
There is NO BUCK on that list. None at my mother’s table, none in Warren’s family, and Warren has been three states away for two years.
So after she went down, I dug the old baby monitor out of the hall closet, wiped the lens on my shirt, and stood it on her shelf between the rabbit and the piggy bank.
Then I waited.
At 1:47 in the morning the monitor chirped on the table and lit up my hands.
I turned the little screen around toward me.
And when I saw WHO WAS STANDING OVER MY DAUGHTER’S BED, I was already running down the hall. ⬇️
1:49
It is nine steps from the kitchen table to her door and I took it in four. I did not turn on the hall light.
Her door was open a hand’s width. I hit it with my shoulder.
There was an old man standing at the foot of the bed with his back to me. He turned around and it was Lyle Kovach.
Seventy-one years old. The canvas shop coat. The belt buckle with the deer on it that he has worn every Friday since before I signed the lease.
He put both hands up like I had a gun on him.
“Corinne,” he said.
Delia sat up in her blankets with the rabbit under one arm and rubbed her eye. “That’s Mr. Buck,” she said, and lay back down.
I got between them so fast I took the lamp cord with my ankle.
I told him to get out of my house.
He didn’t go toward the door. He went toward the window, which is the thing I have chewed on every night since, and he put two fingers under the sash and pushed it up two inches without any effort at all.
“That frame’s swollen,” he said. “Catch turns, but it don’t seat. Has been since July.”
I had checked that window. It looked locked. It felt locked. It was not locked.
He put it back down and stood there with his hands out where I could see them.
“Somebody has been standing in that lot at one in the morning,” he said. “That’s why I been coming up.”
The key board
Warren left in the spring two years ago and the whole thing took eleven minutes in a lawyer’s office with a fish tank in it.
I got Delia and a Corolla with a bad strut. He got the truck and the road.
The duplex came from Milton. He owns the building and the shop under it, and when he heard I was looking he knocked the rent down by two hundred and said the upstairs had been empty a year and empty is worse than cheap.
There is a pegboard in the garage office with about forty keys on it. Every car in the bay, the parts room, the bathroom that jams. Two of them are mine. One is tagged UPSTAIRS in Milton’s handwriting.
I have known about that board since the day I moved in. I have taken a key off it myself, the time I locked us out in February.
Delia was three the first year we lived there and she used to sit on the low wall by the bay door while I carried laundry, and the men would come off their bikes and she would go straight for Lyle, because Lyle’s belt buckle had a deer on it and she liked to put her thumb on the antlers.
She could not say Kovach. Nobody asked her to.
They all fed her Life Savers out of their pockets and they all called me ma’am for two years before they’d call me Corinne, and Joyce, Milton’s wife, took her Thursdays without ever once being asked twice.
That is what that lot is. That is why I could work nights at all.
I started nights in March. Ten to six, at the fulfillment place out on the county road, and it pays a dollar ten more an hour than days and there is no daycare bill because Delia sleeps downstairs at Joyce’s on the nights I go in.
Three nights a week she is not even in that bedroom.
The rabbit’s name is Rabbit. It has been gray since it was white and one ear has always hung wrong.
Sometime in the middle of August that ear stopped hanging wrong.
I noticed it in the laundry basket, turned it over, put it down and thought nothing about it for four weeks, because a mother with a night shift does not go looking for reasons to be awake.
The thread was black and waxed and thick as fishing line. Nobody in my house owns thread like that.
Joyce’s front room
Two days after Lyle stood in my daughter’s room, a woman came up my stairs at four in the afternoon with a state ID clipped to her jacket.
Brenda Cobb, family services, and she was polite the way people are polite when they have already decided to sit down.
She said they had received a report. She said it was anonymous. She said she was required to come out.
The report said my daughter was being left with an unrelated elderly man overnight, three nights a week, in a residence attached to a commercial garage.
It said the mother was frequently absent between the hours of ten and six.
Both of those things are true. That is the part that took the air out of me.
She asked to see Delia’s room. I walked her through it. She wrote down the window.
She asked who else has access to the residence and I stood in my own kitchen and heard myself say, “Nobody.”
Then she went downstairs and sat in Joyce’s front room for forty minutes with the door shut, and I stood at the top of the stairs like a kid waiting to be called.
Joyce came out after and her face was gray. She said Brenda Cobb had asked her whether anybody at the shop had ever been up in my apartment alone.
Joyce said she told her no.
Then she said, “Corinne, I need you to tell me if that’s true.”
The parts notebook
Friday I went down at six, when the bikes come in, and Lyle was in the second bay with the light on his hands.
I told him I had a woman from the state in my kitchen on Wednesday, and that I had lied to her about him, and that I did not know yet whether I was going to keep lying.
He wiped his hands and did not argue with any of it.
He said Delia woke up screaming on a Tuesday in the second week of August, loud enough to hear in the lot, and he came up and my door was unlocked and he sat on the floor by her bed until she quit.
That was one of my nights off. I was nine steps down the hall with the fan going, dead asleep, and I did not hear my own child scream and I did not hear a man come up my stairs.
He said her rabbit’s ear was off and he had seat thread in the shop, so he sewed it back together at the parts desk, and after that she asked him to come check the window, and he came.
Eleven nights, he said. Maybe twelve.
I asked him why he never told me. He said because he figured I’d take it the way I was taking it right then.
Then he went to the parts desk and came back with a spiral notebook so greasy the cover had gone see-through.
Lyle logs plates. He has done it since somebody took a chrome kit out of the lot in 2019, and there is nothing to it, just a date and a number in pencil down the margin, every night he is there.
He turned it around so I could read it.
A silver Malibu. Nineteen nights. First entry August 14.
I asked him what time the entries were.
“One, most of them,” he said. “One-fifteen. He sits with the lights off down by the fence, and about quarter of two he walks up to the corner of the building and he stands there a while, and then he goes.”
I asked him if he could see the man.
“I can see the phone,” Lyle said. “It’s up. He’s holding it up.”
The green paper
I called Warren that night from the stairwell so Delia wouldn’t hear.
He picked up on the second ring and he was warm to me, which he has not been since the fish tank.
He asked about her school. He asked whether she still hated peas. He said he had been thinking a lot lately about how the arrangement wasn’t fair to anybody, and that he wished I’d let him help more.
I asked him where he was.
He said he was three states away, at the yard, about to go out on a run to Tulsa.
I told him about the report. I told him somebody had called the state on me. And he was quiet a second and then he said, “Well, they wouldn’t call if there was nothing to it.”
That was my first try. That is what it got me.
Nine days later a man in a polo shirt knocked on my door at 7:40 in the morning while Delia was putting on her shoes, and handed me a folder, and asked me to say my full name out loud.
Emergency motion to modify custody. A hearing date. A team meeting at the county building first, Room 214, and Brenda Cobb’s name on it as the assigned worker.
I called my mother from the parking lot at work and read her the first page.
She let me finish and then she said that Warren was Delia’s father and that maybe a stable home with two adults in it was not the worst thing in the world for that child.
I hung up on my own mother in a parking lot and sat there until the whistle.
Then I read the affidavit.
He swore under oath that he had come back to Hollis Bend on the sixth of September, out of concern, after learning of the conditions.
Lyle’s notebook starts August 14.
Window three
The credit union in Hollis Bend has three windows and one of them is always closed.
I went in on a Tuesday with the passbook, because there is money in Delia’s account and most of it came from my father dying, and I wanted Warren’s name off it before any judge looked at anything.
I opened it the week she was born. He signed it with me at that same counter with her in the carrier on the floor between us.
The teller was maybe sixty and she took the passbook and typed for a while and her face did a thing.
She asked me to hold on and she went in the back and came out with a printed sheet and a card in a sleeve, the old kind, with signatures on it.
She said the account was flagged.
She said there had been a withdrawal request in the branch on the nineteenth of August. In person. Nearly the whole balance. Signed and dated at that counter.
She turned the slip around and put her finger next to the signature and it was his, the same crooked W he has put on everything since he was nineteen.
I stood there with my hand flat on the counter.
They had not paid it. It is a minor’s account with two signers and it needed mine, and he had been told to come back with me, and he never came back.
He never called me about it either. Not once, in the thirty-two days between that counter and the polo shirt at my door.
“It’s still your account, hon,” she said. “That’s why he couldn’t take it.”
Room 214
Room 214 has one long table and a window that looks at the roof of the jail.
Brenda Cobb sat at the head of it. Warren sat on one side with his lawyer, in a shirt with the creases still in it from the package. I sat on the other with a folder from the dollar store.
Out in the hall there were eleven men on the bench and standing along the wall, in shop coats and vests, holding their helmets, because it was a Friday and Friday is when they are all in that lot anyway. Milton had put a sign on the bay door that said BACK AT ONE.
Brenda Cobb said we were here to talk, not to decide anything, and Warren started talking and did not really stop.
He talked about how he had gotten steady. He talked about a two-bedroom with a yard and a school district. He said the word stability nine or ten times. He said he had not been a good father and that he was owning that, and he said he had been made aware of a situation involving an elderly male in the home.
His lawyer slid a phone across the table with photographs on it. Delia in her pajamas and her backpack, being walked from my door to Joyce’s door at 9:52 at night. Four different nights.
Brenda Cobb looked at them a long time.
Then she asked me, on the record, the same question she had asked me in my kitchen.
I said, “I lied to you.”
Warren stopped talking.
I said that Lyle Kovach had come into my apartment at night without my knowledge, that he had a key off the board downstairs, that he had been in my daughter’s room somewhere around a dozen times in August and September, and that I had found out about it on the seventh at 1:49 in the morning and had not reported it to anybody.
I said it before his lawyer could, because it was going to be said in that room one way or the other, and I wanted it to be mine.
Brenda Cobb wrote for a while.
Then I opened the dollar-store folder and put the affidavit down, and I put Lyle’s notebook down next to it, open to the fourteenth of August, and I put the withdrawal slip from window three down next to that.
I did not say anything about them. I just left them there and let her read.
Warren said the notebook was a piece of garbage a mechanic wrote in pencil.
His lawyer put a hand on his arm.
Lyle came in from the hall with his helmet in both hands and stood at the end of the table and told Brenda Cobb his full name, his date of birth, and that everything I had said about him was correct. Then he said he’d take whatever came of it.
Two deputies took his statement downstairs an hour later. He pled to criminal trespass in October, four hundred dollars, and a no-contact order on the address, which means the man cannot come up my stairs and cannot be in a room with Delia, and he signed it without reading past the first page.
In the hallway afterward Warren caught up to me by the water fountain with a pen already out of his shirt pocket.
He said he would withdraw the whole thing by Monday. Today, even. He said all of it goes away and he goes back to Tulsa, and all I have to do is sign the release on her account, because it was his money too, and because a girl needs a father more than she needs a savings book.
He was still holding the pen out when the elevator opened behind him.
Friday
Eleven weeks and we are on the other side of Hollis Bend now, in a second-floor unit over a laundromat, and the rent is two hundred more, and I work days.
Warren gets two Saturdays a month, supervised, at the visitation center by the library. He has come to four of the six.
The account is in my name only. The passbook lives in a coffee can.
This morning Delia had her cereal and I had toast with jam and she pushed the bowl a little away from her and looked at the window over the sink.
“Does Mr. Buck know where we live,” she said. Not really a question, the way she says things.
I told her he does, and that he isn’t allowed to come over, and that it is my fault and not his and not hers.
She thought about that.
Then she got down and came back with Rabbit and held it up by the loose ear, the black thread gone soft and frayed at one end, hanging wrong again the way it always did.
“Can he fix it if I’m not there,” she said.
I looked at that ear for a second.
“Get your shoes,” I said. “We’ll mail it from the box on the corner.”
If this one sat wrong in your chest, send it to somebody who has ever left their kid with a neighbor because there was no other way to make the rent.
For more tales of the strange things that happen when you’re just trying to get by, check out “I Sat Outside a Shop All Night the Year My Son Turned Nineteen”, or if you’re curious about other mysterious encounters, read “The Biker Asked About a Man I Buried Nine Years Ago”.
