The Sneakers That Brought Him Home

The Phone Call

I was standing at my own kitchen counter folding a basket of towels when my phone rang with the school’s number on the screen, and I felt that particular cold drop in my stomach that every parent knows, the one that arrives before your brain has even caught up to the reason for it.

“Mrs. Combs,” the voice said, and I could hear right away that it belonged to the principal himself and not the front office secretary, which told me something before he had said a single other word. In a town our size, in a school with four hundred kids total from kindergarten through eighth grade, the principal does not personally dial a parent unless it matters.

“I need you to come to the school right now,” he said. His voice had that careful, even tone people use when they are trying very hard not to alarm you and failing at it completely. “Something has happened, and Rhonda is involved.”

I did not ask what kind of something. I have learned, in thirty eight years of living, that the imagination fills in that blank far worse than any answer a person could actually give you, so I simply said I was on my way, hung up, and stood there in my kitchen for one full second with a damp towel still in my hands before I remembered how to move.

I want to tell you plainly, because this is the kind of story where the plain truth matters more than the drama, that my daughter was not hurt. Nobody had hurt her, and she had not hurt anyone else. I did not know any of that yet as I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door, but I want you to know it now so you are not carrying the same weight I carried for those eleven miles into town.

We live outside a little place in the hill country of southern Ohio, the kind of town where the population sign has needed correcting downward for twenty years and nobody has bothered, where the Dollar General closes at nine and that counts as staying open late, where half the graduating class of the high school either joins the National Guard or goes to work at the plant two counties over because there is nothing left running closer than that. I have lived here my whole life. I know every stop sign on the drive into town the way I know the sound of my own daughter’s footsteps on the stairs.

I drove past the Marathon station, past the Wagon Wheel Diner where I have waitressed three nights a week since my husband died, past the VFW hall with its flag always flying no matter the weather, past the little white clapboard church where half the town had gathered four years ago to bury a man I loved more than I have ever loved anything on this earth. I did not look at the church. I never do when I am in a hurry. It asks too much of me to look at it and keep driving at the same time.

By the time I pulled into the gravel lot behind the school, my hands were shaking on the wheel, and I had already run through every terrible possibility a mother’s mind can invent in eleven miles, none of which came anywhere close to what was actually waiting for me inside that building.