The Other Sock

Six minutes is enough time to reach a bus stop forty steps away. It is not enough time if one of the steps stops to lodge an objection.

8:00. They got Kabir out the door at a run, or the winter version of a run, which is a waddle at speed, a small stiff astronaut crossing the frozen driveway with his father’s hand in his hood. The bus stop was at the corner, forty steps, and the forty steps were ice.

At the corner, already waiting, stood the Petersen boy from two doors down, zipped and mittened and early, holding his mother’s hand. Mrs. Petersen gave Papa and his half-dressed son a small bright wave. Papa, hauling Kabir over the ice by the hood, waved back with the hand that was not full of child, and hated the wave, and did it anyway. You wave.

“There it is,” said Papa. Down the road, two blocks off, the long yellow shape, its lights bleeding in the dark. “We’re fine. Wave. Waaave.”

Kabir did not wave. Kabir had stopped, mid-driveway, mid-minus-thirty, with the specific stillness Papa knew from his wife’s descriptions and had prayed never to see in the field.

“The line moved,” said Kabir.

“What line. Whose line. Kabir. The bus.”

“The sock. When I ran, it went back underneath.” He looked up at his father, betrayed by the universe. “It’s walking again.”

The bus reached the corner. The bus opened its doors. The bus, being a bus, waited the exact number of seconds a bus waits, which is not enough seconds for a philosophical emergency about a sock, and then it closed its doors and pulled away with all the other children’s faces in the windows, warm and moving and gone.

8:04.

Papa stood in the road and watched it go, the way you watch a thing you could have caught if the world had been one sock kinder.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Get in the fridge.”

In the car, which was warming from a fridge into a cold room, Papa drove, and Kabir sat in the back in his snowsuit, calm now, the emergency behind him, a boy at peace among the wreckage he had caused and would not be billed for.

“You’ll be late for the store,” Kabir observed.

“I will.”

“Will the cold people tell the manager?”

“They will.”

“Will the manager tell Gary?”

“He will tell Gary,” said Papa, “yes.”

Kabir considered this for a while, watching the dark town slide by, the closed Donut Dépôt with its one lit window, the frozen flag over the Legion.

“I can write him a note,” he offered. “The manager. Tyler taught me. You write the true thing and you sign it. I’ll write that it was the sock. Then it’s not your fault. It’s the sock’s fault. The sock should be in trouble, not Gary.”

Papa looked at his son in the mirror, this small serious person in a snowsuit offering to defend him, in writing, against the manager of NordMart, and felt the specific helpless love of a man who is going to be late and cannot even be angry about why.

“Thank you,” said Papa. “Maybe don’t.”

“Am I in trouble? For the bus.”

“No.”

“For the sock?”

“The sock isn’t in trouble either. Nobody’s in trouble. It’s a Thursday, the bus left, and we’re in a car. This is just how the morning came out.” He found, saying it, that he half believed it. “Some mornings come out like this. You can’t iron every one of them flat.”

Kabir thought about that. About a thing his mother tried to do to mornings, and to shirts, and to the whole family, every single day. Flat, flat, flat.

“She’d want to try,” he said.

“She would,” said Papa. “That’s your mother.”

“Okay.” Kabir went back to the window. Then, quietly, plainly, seeing no reason to keep it to himself:

“This other sock is wrong too.”

Papa drove. He did not say anything. There was a long red light, and he sat at it, in the warming car, in the still-dark morning, and somewhere behind his eyes a small sound started, and it took him a second to place it, because he had not made it in a while, and then he placed it. He was laughing.