SEVEN bikers put a shovel in my son’s hands, and I’d thank every one of them again.
It was a quarter to seven on Labor Day morning.
I was at the kitchen window, and out past the rusted swing set my seventeen-year-old was jamming a blade into the red clay with seven grown men in leather standing in a ring around him.
His face was wet to the chin. His arms shook on every scoop.
And I kept that back door SHUT.
Sixteen days before that, I went into Gavin’s closet hunting for my good bath towel and found a gym sock stuffed with pills.
Little blue ones, stamped to pass for something out of a pharmacy.
A drinking straw cut down short.
Foil with black streaks burned across it.
And blisters on his thumb and two of his fingertips, the reason his hands had lived in his hoodie pocket all summer.
I’d called it a phase.
This was my kid. Honor roll. Starting catcher since ninth grade.
The boy who stuck yellow notes on the coffee maker that said “Ma, you’re the GOAT.”
That boy was gone.
A stranger had moved into his room. He took twenties out of my purse, lied to my face without blinking, and was killing himself one wall over from where I slept.
I tried all of it.
A treatment place two counties over. He walked out on the third day.
A counselor. He sat through six sessions staring at her carpet and said nothing.
Taking his phone and his truck keys. He disappeared for eleven days and came back thinner, with nobody home behind his eyes.
Then came the worst night.
I found him on the bathroom floor, slumped against the side of the tub, a square of foil still pinched in his fingers.
His lips were the color of dishwater.
I sprayed the naloxone up his nose the way the school nurse showed every parent, and dialed 911 with my other hand.
The THIRD time in five weeks.
At the hospital in Joplin, a doctor with his reading glasses pushed up on his head walked me out into the hallway.
“Ms. Varner, if something doesn’t turn around, there won’t be another time you bring him in,” he said. “His body is giving out.”
I drove home a little after two with Gavin passed out against the passenger window.
He was high. He was breathing. That was about all.
I had no ideas left and no hope left.
I was down to bargaining with the ceiling over my bed, and I wasn’t sure anything was on the other side of it.
Somewhere around half past three, I thought of Curtis.
Curtis is my ex-husband’s older brother.
That family used him as the warning they gave the kids.
He rode a motorcycle. He was an addict all through his twenties.
He’s been sober twenty-two years, and the year he got clean he joined up with a motorcycle club, the Second Mile.
When Rob and I split, I dropped Curtis along with the rest of them.
I’ll be honest about why. I was ashamed of him. I liked being the one in that family who’d come out respectable.
Gavin hadn’t seen him since he was nine.
Rob hadn’t returned a call about his own son since spring.
But out of everybody I’d ever met, Curtis was the one who’d been down the hole my boy was in and climbed back up.
I called him at a quarter to four. The dishwasher was still going from supper, clicking every few seconds.
I told him all of it. I couldn’t get through a single sentence without stopping.
He didn’t say a word until I ran dry.
Then nothing came down the line for so long I checked the screen to see if he’d hung up.
“Trace, I can help,” he said. “But you won’t like how. Whatever we do, you stay AWAY from it, whatever you see. I need your word on that.”
“Curtis, bring my boy back to me,” I said.
He came at first light with six other men and lined their bikes along my curb.
They came in my front door without knocking, like they’d paid for the house.
I heard Gavin’s bedroom door bang open. Boots on the floorboards. My son yelling.
Within two minutes they had him out back in gym shorts and a T-shirt, squinting and shaking.
“Ma, what the HELL is going on?” he said.
I was out on the top step by then, arms crossed so tight my ribs hurt.
“They came to help you, baby,” I said.
A man with a gray ponytail held out a shovel. Gavin didn’t take it.
Curtis walked to the far corner by the chain-link fence and pointed at the grass with two fingers.
“Dig it there,” he said. “Seven feet long, three across, six down.”
Gavin laughed, a cracked, ugly sound. “Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s a grave, Gavin,” Curtis said. “I MEASURED IT FOR A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD. And your mother will be standing at the edge of it in her good black dress if you…”
6:38
“…if you don’t dig it yourself, and climb out of it yourself, before dark.”
He said all of it in the same flat voice, like a man reading back a load sheet.
Gavin looked at the shovel.
He looked at the side gate. Somebody had propped it open with a cinder block.
Then he looked up at me on the step.
“Ma,” he said.
I went inside and shut the back door.
I’d given my word at a quarter to four, to the one person in that family who ever kept his.
I dispatch trucks for a living, out of a gravel yard on Range Line Road. Twenty years of writing down the minute something moves. I keep a notepad by the kitchen phone because I can’t stop.
I wrote 6:38.
The window over the sink was up three inches with the screen in, the way I leave it from Memorial Day on. The yard came through it plain as a radio.
Gavin reached out and took the shovel from the man with the gray ponytail. He held it like a bat he’d never swung.
The ponytail man dug in a saddlebag on the grass and came up with a yellow tape measure.
“Want it, Curt?” he said.
Curtis was already pacing the long side along the fence, heel to toe, his lips moving. He pushed a tent stake into the grass with his boot. Then the short side. Another stake.
His hands were steady. Mine weren’t, around a ballpoint from the credit union.
“Seven by three,” Curtis said. “I don’t need a tape for this one.”
The mitt
Rob lives twelve miles up the highway in Carthage, in the brick house with the flagpole, and sells insurance off the square.
His mother, Darlene, is seventy-two and has played piano at the same Baptist church since before he was born.
I kept Varner after the divorce so my name would match Gavin’s on the school forms. I’m forty-five, and in that family I was only ever the one who married in.
The Varners pay for things. It’s how you know you’re in good with them.
Darlene paid for Gavin’s catcher’s gear every season after he made the ninth-grade team. Shin guards, chest protector, the mask with the throat flap.
She’d hand the bag across at the curb after church and say, “Now, we don’t need to make a fuss about it.”
I never asked who we weren’t making the fuss in front of.
That first spring he caught, she put one more thing in the bag. An old brown mitt, the leather gone dark and soft as a wallet, relaced with new rawhide.
“This was your Uncle Wes’s,” she told Gavin. “Wes caught too. He was killed in a car wreck on the river road when he was seventeen. We don’t talk about it, so don’t go pestering your daddy.”
Gavin was fourteen. He slept with that mitt under his pillow for a week, like a much smaller boy.
The wrist strap had W.V. printed inside it in marker gone brown.
Rob told me about Wes exactly once, on our second date, in a booth at the Sonic in Carthage.
Wreck on the river road. Gravel and a curve. He was nineteen and away at college when it happened.
He changed the subject to the Cardinals before I could say I was sorry.
Curtis was the other thing nobody talked about, except as a warning.
Varner Christmases went the same way every year. A cousin would slouch at the table and get told to sit up or end up like Uncle Curtis.
And Curtis would be standing right there at the sink, scrubbing a roaster pan nobody asked him to scrub.
I laughed along with the rest of them. I’m not proud of that either.
When Rob and I split, Darlene kept Gavin. It’s the closest I can come to saying it right.
She kept his Sunday dinners and his gear money, and I let her, because I couldn’t afford a catcher’s mask and my pride both.
Sixteen days before Labor Day, I found that gym sock on his closet shelf.
It was stuffed down in the pocket of that brown mitt, where the ball goes.
I didn’t tell Darlene. I’ve never told Darlene a thing I couldn’t take back.
The stove clock said 7:20 when Curtis took off his vest.
He folded it in thirds and hung it over the top bar of the rusted swing set, the bar Gavin used to stand on to see over the fence.
Then he laid his hand flat on the inside pocket, the way a man feels for his wallet in a crowd.
He did it twice.
Pam Cobb’s phone
Pam Cobb lives across the alley and sings alto in Darlene’s choir.
Pam was out on her deck by eight in a quilted robe, holding her phone sideways over the chain-link like she was filming a parade. Her deck has a wind chime made out of bent forks.
I wrote 8:02. Pam. Filming.
Gavin was a little better than two feet down.
He’d stopped twice to throw up by the fence. The man with the gray ponytail walked over each time, set a jug of water on the grass a yard from him, and walked back to the ring.
He never touched him. The others stayed where they were.
My cell rang at 8:15. The screen said GRAM, because Gavin set it up that way when he was twelve and I never changed it.
“Tracy, I am looking at Pam’s video,” Darlene said. “Motorcycles in your yard. And my grandson down in a hole.”
“Curtis is here,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a second. When she came back it was the voice she uses on the church treasurer.
“Rob’s out on a boat with clients. I’ve left him four messages,” she said. “Listen to me. A place in Utah takes boys like him. Ninety days, out in the mountains, his own counselor. I’ll write a check for thirty-eight thousand tonight, and he can fly out of Springfield in the morning.”
I don’t clear thirty-eight thousand in a year.
“I’ve got two conditions,” she said. “That man is off your property inside the hour. And this stays in the family. Pam’s already taking her video down.”
I carried the phone to the back door and opened it four inches.
“Curtis,” I said. “His grandmother will pay thirty-eight thousand for a place in Utah. Tonight.”
Gavin heard it before Curtis did.
He let go of the shovel and came up out of the hole on his hands and knees, clay to the elbows.
“Send me,” he said. “Ma, I’ll go. I swear to God, I’ll go today.”
Curtis didn’t look at me. He looked at my son.
“The way you went two counties over?” he said.
“That was different.”
“Gavin, you walked out on the third day,” Curtis said. “Gate’s open. My bike’s at the curb with the key in it. Walk out of this one too, if you want. These men won’t stop you.”
Then he turned his head toward the door.
“Trace,” he said. “I’ve got your word.”
My hand was on the knob. Gavin was kneeling in the grass, looking up at me the way he did when he was five and the nurse came in with the shot.
I shut the door.
I still had the phone in my hand. Darlene had heard all of it.
“You’re being stubborn, and it’s going to cost that boy,” she said. “Rob found that place back in May, honey.”
The junk drawer
He sat on the edge of that hole for forty-one minutes. I wrote down when he sat and when he stood.
He climbed back down in at 9:02 and picked up the shovel.
The man with the gray ponytail told me his name at a quarter past ten, when he came around front and knocked like a meter reader to ask could they fill their water jugs at my sink.
“Dale,” he said.
He wouldn’t come through the kitchen to the back. “That door’s yours.”
While the tap ran he told me Curtis had been on the phone at five that morning with the place in Springfield where Curtis got clean. They had a bed open the morning after Labor Day.
“They want three thousand down,” Dale said. “And the club sits with him. Round the clock, first three days. We’ll fight about who gets which.”
He carried the jugs out the front and around the side of the house, the long way.
I didn’t have three thousand.
I knew where the truck title was. Junk drawer, under the takeout menus, with everything else I’d taken off him. His keys. His phone.
Every night of the eleven days, I’d charged that phone and gone through it at the kitchen table, hunting for a name or a street I could drive to. When he came home, I let it die.
I pulled the title out. The phone came up with it, the charger cord wound around it the way I’d wound it in a hurry.
Back in May, honey.
I plugged it in by the toaster. It took six minutes to come on. I wrote that down, because my hands needed a job.
His code was his jersey number twice. It has been since seventh grade.
The thread with his father was third from the top. Gavin had him saved as dad, small d.
I’d scrolled past it every one of those eleven nights. Rob hadn’t called about his son since spring. I never thought a man like that had anything in there I could drive to.
The fourteenth of May, at 11:52 at night:
dad im in trouble. im using and i cant stop. please dont tell ma. can you come get me
Rob, six minutes later:
cant tonight bud. talk tmrw
The next afternoon there was a payment notice. Two hundred dollars from Rob Varner. In the memo line he’d typed gas.
Under that, from Rob:
handle it. your mom has enough on her plate. this stays between us
I wrote it on the pad like a load that never got picked up. 5/14, 11:52. R.V.
Gavin had written again three weeks later. dad?
Rob didn’t answer that one either.
He wrote one more time in the middle of the summer, at 1:14 in the morning. One word. please
Under it, in small gray letters, the phone said Read 1:14 AM.
Wes
He was in it past his shoulders by three in the afternoon.
Pam had gone inside. The ring had moved back into the strip of shade along the fence, all except Curtis, who’d turned a bucket over at the head end of the hole and sat on it with his forearms on his knees.
Dale had taken my stepladder out of the garage at noon and lowered it in. At half past he pulled it back up, because Gavin had started using it to sit on.
I’d been at the sink most of an hour, washing glasses that were already clean.
Gavin quit digging and leaned on the handle with both forearms.
“Who’s it for?” he said.
Curtis didn’t answer.
“A man doesn’t know a grave by heart,” Gavin said. “And you didn’t even use the tape.”
Curtis got up off the bucket.
He went to the swing set, took his vest down and pulled a folded paper out of the inside pocket. Then he sat on the edge of the hole and let himself down into it beside my son.
I turned the water off.
From the sink I couldn’t see either one of them below the grass. All I had was what came up out of the ground and through the screen.
Paper, unfolding.
“Read me the name,” Curtis said.
“Wesley Alan Varner,” Gavin said. “1980. 1997.”
“Turn it over.”
“Seven by three by six,” Gavin said. “Somebody wrote it in pencil.”
“Varners dig their own out at the church past Diamond,” Curtis said. “My dad was supposed to do Wes’s. He couldn’t get the shovel in the ground. The morning after the visitation he handed it to me and said, then you dig your brother’s. I was twenty-two. I wrote the numbers on his card so I could never get out of knowing them.”
“Gram said a wreck,” Gavin said.
“Gram put a wreck in the paper,” Curtis said. “Wes and me were using in a trailer out on Jolly Mill Road. I woke up. He didn’t.”
The shovel scraped down the side of the hole and hit the bottom.
“Rob was nineteen and off at college,” Curtis said. “They called him home and told him a wreck. He’s been saying it so long he might believe it.”
“His mitt,” Gavin said. “I put my stuff in his mitt.”
“I know where you kept it,” Curtis said. “Trace told me at four o’clock this morning.”
Nothing came up out of the hole for a while but his breathing, thick, the way it gets when he’s trying not to cry.
“I’ve dug one of these for a Varner boy,” Curtis said. “I’m not digging the second one. That one’s yours. And then you’re climbing out.”
Behind me the front door opened without a knock.
The back door
Rob lived in this house eleven years, and he still comes in like he does.
Darlene came in behind him in her church slacks, with her purse on her arm and her checkbook already out of it.
Rob’s face was red from a day on the water. He went straight through the kitchen for the back door.
I put my back against it.
“Move, Tracy,” he said. “I’m getting my son out of a hole in the ground. Have you lost your damn mind? Seven bikers? Curtis? Pam Cobb sent that video to the whole alto section. I have clients in that choir. I have clients on this street.”
He reached past me for the knob. I kept my hand on it.
“Move,” he said.
Darlene set her checkbook on my counter and uncapped her pen.
“I’ll make it out for thirty-eight thousand tonight,” she said. “He flies out of Springfield in the morning, Curtis goes home, and whatever Curtis is telling that boy out there stays out there.”
I didn’t say anything.
I picked Gavin’s phone up off the counter, still on its cord, turned it around and slid it across to Rob with the May thread open.
He read it the way he reads a claim he’s about to deny.
“He said it was one time,” Rob said. “A party, he got scared, and I sent him money so he could drive himself home. I said we’d talk. And then I had the agency. Tracy, you know what that spring was. I had four hundred hail claims. I found the Utah place. I did. I printed it out and drove it over to my mother’s, and she…”
He stopped.
“Go ahead and call the sheriff,” I said. “I’ll hand him that phone.”
Rob didn’t reach for his own phone. He looked at his mother.
“Mother, you said it’d pass,” he said. “Leave Tracy out of it, boys go through things, look how I turned out. Word for word what you said about Wes.”
“Robert,” Darlene said.
“I was nineteen. And you said it about Wes.”
Darlene capped her pen.
“I put one Varner boy in the ground with a decent name on him,” she said to me. “I will not have this family in the paper twice.”
She put the checkbook back in her purse and closed the clasp.
“Then you can pay for whatever this is yourself,” she said.
“I’ve got a truck title,” I said.
She went out the front door and left it standing open. Her Buick was idling at the curb behind the bikes.
Rob stayed in my kitchen a while longer with his keys in his hand. He looked at the back door, and at me in front of it.
“Has he been eating?” he said.
“Ask him,” I said.
He didn’t. He went out after his mother.
Curtis had climbed out of the hole. He knocked on the glass behind my head at 3:41.
“He’s six down, Trace,” he said. “Come stand at the edge.”
I opened the back door.
I went across the yard in my work shirt with the company name on the pocket, no black dress, and stood at the edge with the toes of my sneakers on the clay.
Gavin was six feet down by himself. The men didn’t move. I put my hands in my back pockets so I wouldn’t.
He got his elbows over the edge on the second try. Then one knee. Then he was lying in the grass at my feet with his face in it, breathing.
“Who sits with me on day three?” he said into the grass.
“Me,” Curtis said.
Day seventy-nine
The day before Thanksgiving I was at the kitchen window at a quarter to seven.
Past the rusted swing set there’s a patch of grass seven by three that came in thinner and greener than the rest. It’s sunk about an inch.
Gavin and the Second Mile filled it in by headlight on Labor Day night, and Curtis raked seed over it before he left.
The driveway has no truck in it. A man from Neosho counted $9,400 onto the hood the morning after Labor Day, while Curtis waited at the curb to drive Gavin to Springfield.
Darlene hasn’t called. Rob’s support check still comes on the first, with nothing in the memo line.
Gavin came home last night on a pass, the first one his counselor would put her name on.
There was a yellow note on the coffee maker when I came down.
Ma, out back. Day 79.
He and Curtis were out by the fence. Curtis on his bucket. Gavin standing on the sunk grass with both hands out of his pockets, bare in the cold.
I wrote 6:45 on the notepad.
Then I opened the back door and went out.
Send this one to the person in your life who would pick up at a quarter to four.
For more stories from this incredible family, check out “My Wife’s Girl Held Still While I Measured the Marks on Her Arm”, “My Son Sent the Lift Bus to the Orchard. His Wife Ran the Trip.”, and “My Ma Swore She Buried That Medal in Tommy’s Casket in 1996”.
