The Grandchild They Left At Home
The Call After Midnight
I am sixty four years old, I have lived in the same subdivision outside Wichita for thirty one years, and I have learned that the phone never rings after eleven with good news. It rings because somebody is in the hospital, or somebody’s truck slid off a county road in the ice, or, as it turned out that night, because a twelve year old girl was standing alone in a dark kitchen holding the receiver of a landline nobody in that house had used in years.
I still keep a landline. Force of habit from my husband, who passed six years ago and never trusted a cell phone to have signal when it mattered. That landline is the only reason Ruthie could reach me at all, because her own phone had died sometime around suppertime and nobody had thought to leave her a charger, or a full pantry, or, as I would find out inside the hour, anybody at all.
Our subdivision sits close enough to the wheat fields that you can still hear the grain elevator running some nights, and close enough to Wichita that Kenneth drives twenty minutes into the city every morning to work the floor at one of the aircraft plants on the west side, the same trade half the fathers on our street learned from their own fathers. It is a good, steady, unglamorous kind of life, the kind that raises children on Friday night football and church potlucks and county fair entries, and on the whole it has been a fine place to raise a family. I say that first because none of what follows happened in some cold, distant household. It happened in an ordinary one, on an ordinary street, which is exactly why it took me as long as it did to see it plainly.
“Grandma,” she said, and her voice was so steady it worried me more than crying would have. Ruthie has never been a crier. She is the kind of child who solves the problem in front of her first and feels whatever she is going to feel about it later, alone, on her own time. “Miss Ferris left. She said she wasn’t coming back tonight.”
“Left to go where, honey?”
“She didn’t say. She just packed her bag and said she had to go home and that I should lock the door behind her.”
I want to tell you I stayed calm on the phone, the way you are supposed to for a child. I did, mostly. But I was already up out of my chair, already patting the counter for my car keys, already doing the math on how many minutes it takes to get from my street to my son’s street at that hour with no traffic on the county road between us. Twelve. It takes twelve minutes if the lights are with you.
“Is your brother there?” I asked, already knowing the answer, because I already knew where her brother was.
“No, Grandma. Nobody’s here but me and the dog.”
I did not ask where her parents were. I already had a fairly good idea, and I did not want to give that idea room to grow any bigger in my chest until I had my shoes on.
“Sit tight, sweetheart,” I told her. “Doors locked. I’m coming right now.”
“Okay,” she said, and then, because she is who she is, “Can you bring dog food? We’re almost out.”
That is the detail I want you to sit with for a second. Not fear. Not tears. A twelve year old girl, alone in a house at nearly midnight, worried about whether the family dog was going to eat breakfast.