The Day I Trusted My Granddaughter’s Fear
Sunday At The Farm
We had everybody out to the house that Sunday, the way we do most warm months, folding chairs dragged out onto the grass behind the chicken coop, a card table sagging under more deviled eggs and banana pudding than any one family should reasonably need. Lane manned the smoker the way he has for twenty years, and Marty showed up early to help him haul the chairs, and Pamela came with Lamar, home for the weekend for once, his arm around her shoulders the entire afternoon like he was afraid a strong wind might try to take her somewhere.
Heather ran through the yard with the neighbor’s boy chasing the dog in circles, entirely unaware that she was, in her own small way, the reason the whole family was finally sitting together and saying things out loud that had gone unsaid for six weeks, and in Lane’s case, for thirty years.
At one point that afternoon, my husband pulled a folding chair up next to Pamela’s and sat with her a long while, not saying much, just present, the way he used to sit with me in the year after we lost Constance, when neither of us had the words yet and both of us needed someone sitting close anyway. I watched them from the porch, my daughter’s hand finding her father’s, and I thought about how close we had come to sitting on opposite sides of a fear none of us needed to carry alone.
Somebody’s church group had dropped off two more casserole dishes by the end of the day, the way this county always does when word gets around that a family has had a scare, even a scare with a good ending. The VFW hall down the road had a fish fry that same night that half the men in the family wandered off to for an hour, the smell of hot oil trailing back to us on the evening air, and somewhere past the tree line you could hear the high school band running through its fight song for Friday’s game, the same three notes over and over, the sound of an ordinary small town getting on with an ordinary Sunday.
It was, in every way that mattered, a perfectly ordinary evening. I do not think I have ever been so grateful for ordinary in my whole life.