The Boy Who Cried Quietly

I was eleven the summer I broke the ship in the bottle, and I have never told anybody how long I kept it broken. It stood on a wooden stand in Grandpa Amos's greenhouse between the tomato pots, and he had built it the year he came home from the navy.

My elbow caught the stand. The bottle went off the edge and burst on the brick, and inside the glass the ship sagged over with one mast snapped and the sail crumpled like a moth's wing. Amos was humming in the kitchen with the radio on low, and the ferns were dripping onto the brick. Nobody saw.

So I wrapped the pieces in a rag and pushed them behind the sack of potting soil. Tomorrow, I told myself. It was a deadline I had no plan to meet.

Two days later he came onto the porch, wiping his hands on his trousers, and asked whether I had moved his ship. "No," I said. "It was on the stand Tuesday." "I haven't been in there." I went on lacing my shoe.

That was the day it stopped being an accident.

By the second week he was searching in earnest. The drawers came out of the potting bench, one after another. He lifted the newspapers off the chair nobody ever sat in, and squared them, and put them back in the same order, and then stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides.

On the Thursday he came round the side of the house with a screwdriver and a brass hasp. "What's that for?" I asked. "So I know," he said, "one way or the other."

The key went on a nail inside the kitchen door, where anybody at all could reach it.

After that I stopped going in for tomatoes. The ferns went dry. I invented homework I did not have. "You used to live in that greenhouse," he said one evening. "I've got a lot on," I said, which was the truest thing I told him all month. He let it go, which was worse.

On a Sunday in August he carried two glasses of lemonade out to the step, and he sat down beside me and put one in my hand and said nothing for long enough that I started counting bricks. "I keep coming back to somebody being in there, going through my things," he said. The ice ticked in his glass. "It isn't the ship, it's that I've stood in my own kitchen counting up who it could have been." He drank. "My father cut that hull. I was nineteen when he held the pieces and I glued them." His voice went on the word father.

I took the key off the nail.

The rag was where I had left it, stiff with dust and lighter than it should have been, and I carried it in past the ferns and the empty stand and opened it out on the step between the two glasses. "It was me," I said. "The first day, and then I told you it wasn't, and I kept on telling you." He did not look up.

He turned the snapped mast over in his fingers. "Glass is glass," he said, "and the wood will glue." He laid the mast on the step, and the tomato leaves rattled against the window behind us. "Three weeks I've spent thinking a stranger walked into my greenhouse. That's the part nobody can glue."

We glued it that afternoon at the kitchen table. My hands shook the mast out of true and his came down over mine to hold it straight, and we sat there with the glue drying and the radio on, and by supper the ship stood on its stand again with a crooked mainmast. The hasp stayed. He gave me the key to keep, and I have it still.

The truth costs less the earlier you pay it.