The Grandchild They Left At Home

Home Again

Ruthie and I flew back to Kansas two days ahead of the rest of the family. I enrolled her in the last week of summer camp at Cedar Ridge so she would have somewhere to be during the day, and she slept in my guest room, the one with the quilt her grandfather’s mother made, and for the first time in longer than I want to admit, I heard that child laugh at supper.

We did not talk much about the trip. She asked once whether her brother knew what had actually happened, and I told her I did not know yet, but that it was not her job to manage anyone’s feelings about it, including his.

“I just want my picture on the fridge too,” she said one evening, out of nowhere, over dishes.

I did not have an answer for that yet. I would, soon enough.

In the meantime I did the only thing that was mine to do. I took her school picture from that summer, the one nobody at her own house had gotten around to picking up from the drugstore counter, and I had it framed and set on my own mantel, next to her grandfather’s photograph in his old service uniform. She noticed it the first evening she came in from camp. She did not say anything about it. She just stood in front of it for a long moment, the way you stand in front of something you have been waiting to see without knowing you were waiting, and then she went and set the table without being asked.

The Cookout At Cedar Ridge

Kenneth and Sheridan came home on a Friday, and by the following Sunday the whole extended family had gathered at the church cookout the way we do most Augusts, folding tables under the pavilion, a cooler of lemonade, the smell of charcoal drifting over from the grill Kenneth’s father in law mans every year without being asked twice.

Word travels in a family and a congregation the size of ours, and by the time the burgers were on, most people had heard some version of what happened on that ship. The version Sheridan told, standing near the dessert table with a paper plate in one hand, was that I had “overreacted to a simple miscommunication” and “made a scene in front of strangers over nothing.” She used the word dramatic twice in one sentence about me. I stood close enough to hear it and said nothing, because I did not need to be the one to correct her.

Miss Ferris was there. She teaches the same Sunday school class every week, cookout or not, and she had been standing near enough to hear Sheridan’s version too.

Sheridan’s own mother, who had heard only pieces of the story until that afternoon, turned to Miss Ferris and asked her, plainly, in front of the dessert table and half the youth group, whether it was true that she’d only agreed to one night.