The Grandchild They Left At Home
The Small Things I Had Always Noticed
I want to be honest here, because it would be easy to make this sound like something it was not. Kenneth and Sheridan did not lock Ruthie in a closet. They did not raise a hand to her. If you sat across from them at a Sunday dinner, you would see an ordinary young family, tired the way all young families with two kids and two jobs are tired, and you would have no particular reason to worry.
But I am her grandmother, and I have had eyes on that family for twelve years, and there is a difference between not seeing something and not being looked for.
Ruthie’s brother plays travel baseball, and he is good at it, honestly good, all-district for his age group last spring. Every new season he gets new cleats, a new bag, a new glove broken in exactly right. Ruthie runs cross country and made regionals as a seventh grader, which her own coach told me was no small thing for a girl her age. She still wears the running shoes from two springs ago, because, in Sheridan’s words, “she’s not outgrowing them fast enough to justify it yet.”
His school picture goes up on the refrigerator every year, right in the middle, at eye level. Hers goes in the same kitchen drawer as the take out menus, because, and I am quoting Ruthie here, not guessing, “there wasn’t room this year.”
When the four of them go out to eat, he orders first. Every time. It is such a small thing that I did not notice it as a pattern until the fourth or fifth dinner, watching Sheridan turn to him automatically, the way you turn toward a plant to check if it needs water, while Ruthie waited her turn without being asked to.
None of it, taken alone, would hold up as evidence of anything. That is what makes this particular kind of unfairness so hard to fight. It never arrives all at once. It arrives one cleat, one photograph, one dinner order at a time, until a girl of twelve has quietly learned the rules of her own house without anybody ever having to say them out loud.
Even the seating in that house had a pattern to it. Her brother got the bedroom with the window that caught the morning sun, the one that used to be the guest room, because he “needed the space for his trophies.” Ruthie’s room was the smaller one at the end of the hall, the one that had been a linen closet before Kenneth and Sheridan put in a bed and called it finished. Nobody ever sat the family down and decided this on purpose. It simply accumulated, the way water finds the lowest point in a yard without anyone digging the ditch.
The cruise itself was framed, when I heard about it secondhand from Sheridan’s sister, as a reward. Her brother had made the all star team. This was his trip, earned, deserved, a family celebration of his hard work. Ruthie’s regional finish in cross country had happened two weeks earlier and had not, as far as I ever heard, earned so much as a special dinner.
I do not think Kenneth and Sheridan sat down and decided to love one child more than the other. I think it is worse than that, in a way. I think they simply never noticed they were doing it, because noticing would have required looking at Ruthie as closely as they looked at her brother, and looking costs something that, lately, they had stopped being willing to spend.