The Warm Spot

Part One: Four Years Old

I raised my grandson, Kevin, after his parents died in a car accident.

He was only four.

It was a Tuesday in February. Ice on the roads outside Dayton, Ohio. My son, Michael, and his wife, Rachel, were driving home from a church potluck on Route 35. Kevin was at my house, because I’d offered to keep him for the evening so they could have a little time to themselves.

A tractor-trailer jackknifed on a bridge near Xenia.

The state trooper who came to my door at eleven-thirty that night had a little girl of his own. I could tell by the way he looked past me, into the living room, where Kevin was asleep on the couch under my afghan with a coloring book on his chest.

“Mrs. Haley,” the trooper said. “I’m so sorry.”

I was fifty-eight years old.

My husband, Harold, had died three years earlier. A heart attack while shoveling the driveway.

I was a widow with a modest little house in Kettering, a job in the cafeteria at Fairmont High School, and a sore hip that the doctor said would need replacing someday.

And I had a four-year-old boy asleep on my couch who didn’t know yet that his whole world had just ended.