What Tommy Didn't Know

What Tommy Didn't Know by Linda Hepler Evie was sitting at her desk, reading the list of incoming fourth graders when she saw the name: Thomas A. Maxwell. "Oh, no," she thought. Why had she not kept better track of the years, transferred to another school? How could time have passed so quickly? Her hands began to tremble. In a few minutes Thomas A. Maxwell would file into her room with the other children and look at her across 43 his desk. Would she be able to pick him from the others? It will be the eyes, she thought. There would be no mistaking the eyes. Rick's eyes, her own Indian grandmother's eyes. Ten years ago Rick had been a high school senior, wild, always in trouble, filling the house with his anger and their lives with one disaster after another. She had sat in the dark living room, listening in disbelief to her son, his face lost in the shadows. Why had he always chosen the middle of the night to tell her about some awful predicament? Why her, and never his father? "How do you know?" Evie had asked when the initial shock was over. "Maybe it's not yours. You can't be sure." "I'm sure," he had said. "I was the only one seeing her. Nothing will ever come of it. She already has a kid. And a husband." "My God," Evie had thought. "A married woman. This boy has lost his mind. Who else knows?" she had asked aloud. "No one. Her husband will think it's his. She'll make him think it. He'll kill somebody if he finds out. Probably me. He'll believe her." But he hadn't. Evie had been peeling potatoes a few weeks later when the phone rang, and a man's voice, thick and threatening, had asked for Rick. She hadn't recognized the voice. "Please," she had prayed, "not more trouble." "He's not here," she had said. "May I take a message?" Her heart thumped in her ears. There was a momentary pause, and then, "Just tell him Johnnie Maxwell called. He'll know." She never told Rick about the call, and the whole thing slipped away, unreal, as if it had never happened. Months later she had been going through Rick's pockets before putting his jeans in the washer when she found the picture. A dark haired baby, dressed in a yellow sweater suit gazed at the world through narrow blue eyes. On the back of the picture was written in a woman's handwriting, "Thomas A. Maxwell, age 4 months." "Coincidence," Evie thought, "just a coincidence. Any woman who would sleep with a high school kid, would sleep with others. That child could be anyone's." She had set the picture on the shelf above the washer, and when she came down that evening to put the clothes in the dryer, the picture was gone. She never spoke of it, not to Rick, not to anyone, certainly not her husband. It would have been the final straw for him where Rick was concerned. The incident lay buried in some dark corner of her mind for several years, until Rick, by then a married man, became a father. Evie had held the tiny form of her grandson in her arms and remembered the picture. "Did Rick keep the picture of Thomas A. Maxwell?" she wondered. When Rick had married and moved to his own house, Evie had stored the things left behind on the top shelf of his closet. One box held old photographs and letters . Evie found the box shoved to the back of the closet shelf. "If it isn't in here," she thought, "I'll just forget about it." She had sat on his bed and blown away the dust. There, near the bottom in a plastic cover, was the picture. No mistake , no coincidence. The child in the picture had the same eyes, the same hair as her new grandson. "That is his child. I always knew it, really. Leave it with the past." She had put the picture back into the box and the...