The Grandchild They Left At Home

What Miss Ferris Told Me

Miss Ferris is nineteen, home from her first year of college, and she teaches Sunday school two rows down from where I sit at Cedar Ridge. I have known her since she was in pigtails. She did not sound relieved to hear from me. She sounded like someone who had been waiting all night for somebody, anybody, to call and ask her the question I was about to ask.

“Sheridan told me it was one night,” she said. “One night, while they drove down to Oklahoma City to see Kenneth’s cousin. That’s what she told me when she asked, and that’s the only reason I said yes. I’ve got summer classes starting. I can’t just disappear for ten days.”

“Ten days,” I repeated.

“That’s what I found out yesterday, when I asked Sheridan what time they’d be landing back and she said something about the ship not docking again until the twenty second. I didn’t even know there was a ship until then. She never said cruise. She said Oklahoma City.”

I sat with that for a second. Not the lie itself, exactly. The specific shape of it. Sheridan had not simply forgotten to mention the truth. She had built a smaller, more forgettable lie on purpose, one sized exactly to what a nineteen year old with summer classes might agree to.

“I told her I couldn’t do it,” Miss Ferris went on. “I told her I had to go home tonight, that this wasn’t what I signed up for, and she got short with me on the phone. Said I was being dramatic, that Ruthie was low maintenance and could basically watch herself. I didn’t feel right leaving her alone, Mrs. Thorne. I really didn’t. But I also didn’t feel right staying and pretending that was an acceptable plan, if that makes any sense.”

It made perfect sense. She had done the one thing decent people do when they are handed a lie to prop up. She had refused to hold it up any longer and had said so, out loud, to the person who told it.

I thanked her. I meant it. Not everyone quits a job on principle at nineteen years old.