The Duffel Bag on My Porch

I dished up the noodles over mashed potatoes. Three plates. Nobody ate.

I carried a plate up to Kaylee.

She was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, still in the gray sweatshirt, with the sleeves down over her hands. She is a tall girl and she runs the 800 for the high school. Sitting like that she looked about nine.

“I’m not hungry, Grandma.”

“I know it. It’ll keep.” I set the plate on her dresser. “Is he gone?”

“He’s gone.”

“Is Mom mad at me?”

“Your mother is upset. That’s not the same as mad, and it’s not the same as mad at you.”

She picked at the cuff of her sleeve.

“I’d like to see your arm,” I said. “You don’t have to show me. But I’d like to.”

For a long moment I thought she would not. Then she pushed the sleeve up, slowly, past the elbow.

There were four marks on the outside of her arm. Four, in a row, each about the size of a nickel, already gone the color of a plum. On the inside there was a fifth, the thumb, darker than the others.

She let me look. That was what undid me. She held her arm out to me the way she used to hold out a skinned knee, trusting that I would know what to do with it.

I went and ran the washcloth cold in the bathroom and wrapped it around a handful of ice from the tray and sat down on the bed and held it there. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Her hair smelled like the apple shampoo she has used since the sixth grade.

“You didn’t ask what I said to him,” she said after a while. “To make him mad.”

“I was standing right there. I heard what you said.”

“It was rude.”

“It was. And tomorrow or the next day I might say something to you about how we talk to people in this house. But listen to me, Kaylee Ann.” I waited until she looked up. “There is nothing you could have said. Do you understand me? There is no sentence in the English language that makes that all right. A grown man who is angry at a child has every choice in the world. He can walk outside. He can send her to her room. He can come find me. He picked that one.”

She cried then, finally, the kind of crying that comes up from the stomach. I held the washcloth and I held her.

When she had quieted I said, “I’ve called the sheriff’s office. A deputy’s coming out to look at that arm.”

She sat up straight. “Tonight? Grandma, no. Mom will never forgive me. She’ll say I ran him off.”

“You didn’t run him off and you didn’t call anybody. I did both. If your mother has a quarrel, it’s with me, and I can stand it.” I tucked her hair behind her ear. “All you have to do is tell the truth to a man I’ve known since he was nine years old.”

Headlights came up the lane forty minutes after I hung up. No siren, no flashing lights. Just a county cruiser parking by the yard gate, and Wade Purcell wiping his boots on my mat.

I taught Wade in Sunday school at First Christian when he could not sit in a chair for the length of a Bible verse. He is forty-four now, with a daughter of his own in the eighth grade. He still calls me Miss Peg.