I sat in the chair opposite.
For a while, the boy concentrated on drinking.
His father did not fill the silence.
That helped.
Eventually, Max said:
“I looked at the wrong person.”
Darian leaned forward.
“What do you mean?”
“At the chairs.”
I knew the auditorium.
Four short rows.
A narrow aisle.
Parents holding coats in their laps because the school had never acquired enough hooks for an event.
Max had helped choose which side he wanted his father to sit on.
He wanted to see him when he came through the cardboard arch.
“I saw the suit,” the child continued.
“I thought it was you first.”
Darian’s face tightened.
“Then Uncle Julian waved.”
Helena’s brother.
A man who had visited the house often enough for Max to know him, but not often enough to be the person a frightened child searched for in a crowd.
“What did you think happened?” Darian asked.
Max looked down.
“That you changed your mind.”
“About coming?”
A nod.
“Because of the costume?”
Another.
Darian moved his hand closer.
“I didn’t see the costume. I didn’t change my mind because of it.”
Max watched him.
“Then why didn’t you come?”
It was the question every adult had been avoiding.
His father answered.
“I believed something I should have asked you about myself.”
The performance was called The Tin Traveler.
It was a school-written story about a machine trying to find the right place to deliver a letter.
Max played the traveler.
A silver-painted cardboard chest panel.
A small blue cap.
A bag made from felt.
No helmet.
He insisted on that because, during rehearsal, he discovered the cardboard headpiece made it difficult to hear his classmates.
He had six speaking parts.
One involved a joke he found so funny that, for days, he couldn’t practice it without laughing before the final word.
I helped with the felt bag.
His art teacher helped secure the cardboard panels.
Max painted the buttons himself.
He wanted his father to see the costume before the performance.
