The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern

“Well. That’s that, then.”

Marcy put her hand over mine on the paper. It was a warm hand with a wedding band worn thin.

“Honey,” she said. “Is there somebody I can call? Anybody at all?”

I opened my purse and took out a card I had carried in the zip pocket for ten years. Elmer’s cousin, a retired nurse, had told me to write down who to call if something happens and keep it where a stranger would find it. In my own printing it said: In case of emergency, call Fern Holloway, my sister, and a number.

Marcy read it twice, and I saw her swallow.

“Fern’s the one I should have called at noon,” I said.

She dialed on her own phone. I heard it ring once. Fern answers on the first ring. She has ever since a school bus of hers slid into a ditch in 1987 and nobody could reach her.

“Fern Holloway.”

“Mrs. Holloway, my name is Marcy, I work for the airline in St. Louis. I’m sitting here with your sister Oleta. She’s physically all right. She’s been waiting in the terminal since this morning, and I think she’s been left here.”

A second of nothing on the line.

Then Fern, in the voice of a woman setting something heavy down very gently, said, “Put her on.”

I took the phone. I could not make a word come out.

“Oleta. Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Good. Stay with her. Don’t you move. I am getting in the car.”

“It’s two hours and forty minutes, Fern.”

“I know how far it is. I’ll be there by seven.”

“Fern.” My voice cracked in the middle, finally. “I should have called you at noon.”

“Stop that,” she said. “You’re calling me now.”

There was not one syllable of I told you so. It was the kindest thing my sister has ever done for me, and she has done a good many.

Marcy had to go work her counter. She came back in ten minutes with a fresh cup of water and a gray blanket, and put it around my shoulders even though the room was warm. Then she took me back to the employee break room, where there was a couch and a coffee maker, and I heard her tell her supervisor in a low voice, “That’s somebody’s mother. She doesn’t sit out there.”

She worked her shift. At six she clocked out. She did not leave.

She sat on the break room couch with her shoes off and asked me nothing about my son. She asked about Elmer. I told her he knew every dog on his route by name and carried biscuits in his coat pocket. She told me her own mother was in a home in Belleville.

At ten till seven my sister walked into that break room in her church coat, with her purse over her arm like she was going to testify. She was seventy-six years old and had driven that far in a Buick. She looked at me. She looked at Marcy.

“You’re the one who called,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fern took Marcy’s hand in both of hers and held it a very long time and did not say a word.

Then she turned to me. “Did you eat?”

“Crackers.”

“We’ll get a hamburger. Can you walk?”

“I can walk.”

“Then get your suitcase.”