The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern
At the door I thanked Marcy. I did not know how. I gave her the only thing I had, which was the sun hat from the church rummage sale, the five-dollar one with the ribbon. She laughed, and then she wasn’t laughing, and she put it on her head and wore it out to her car.
We stopped at a Hardee’s in Union. Fern watched me eat every bite of my hamburger before she touched hers. Then she took my hand palm up, the way our mother used to, as if she were getting ready to read it.
“I’m going to say two things,” Fern said. “Then I’ll hush. One. That money is not gone because you’re stupid. It’s gone because you loved somebody and trusted a thing that should have been trusted. Don’t you let anybody tell you different, and that includes you.”
I nodded. I could not do anything else.
“Two. You are not going to apologize for this. Not to Kayla. Not to the church. Not to Randy. You’ll tell the truth when you’re asked, in your own plain voice. And you are not going to say ‘It’s all right.’ Because it’s not, and you’ve spent eighty-one years saying it was.”
Here is what happened on the other end, which I did not see. I have it from Kayla, from Hannah, and from one conversation with Randy that I will get to.
Kayla did not know.
I need you to hear that, because the town was inclined to doubt it later, and the town was wrong. Randy had told Kayla on Thursday that I had changed my mind, that I had cold feet about flying at my age. He said it so tenderly that Kayla cried and hugged him. She asked if she should call me. He said, “Give her a day, honey. She’s embarrassed.”
Fern called Kayla’s phone at twenty-five till five that afternoon, from her kitchen in Clayton Grove, with her car keys already in her other hand. Kayla was in the Denver airport by then, at a pretzel stand, while Cody sat on the floor with his backpack. The Honolulu flight was boarding in forty minutes.
Fern did not rage. She said, “Kayla, this is Fern Holloway. Your mother-in-law spent the day on a bench in Terminal 2 at the St. Louis airport. An airline agent sat down with her at four o’clock. She had no ticket. I’d like you to ask your husband where he put her.”
Kayla did not say a word, Fern told me. Then she said, “Thank you, Fern,” in a voice like paper, and hung up.
Randy was in a chair at the gate, charging his phone, with a sandwich from the food court. Kayla walked over and stood in front of him and asked one question, Hannah says, so low that two people nearby leaned in.
“Where is your mother, Randy?”
And he looked up, my boy, and I will tell you what undid him. He did not lie. With his wife and his daughter standing over him, he looked at Kayla’s face and could not make the lie come.
“She didn’t have a ticket,” he said. “I couldn’t afford hers.”
“You took her money.”
“I was going to pay it back.”
“You took her money and left her in an airport.”
“I told myself somebody would find her. I didn’t know how to tell you.” He put his hands over his face. “I’m so behind, Kayla. The truck, and your mother’s place, and the loan. I wanted just once to give you something.”
Cody, eleven years old, on the floor with his tackle box of rocks on his knees, said, loud enough for half the gate to hear, “Dad, you left Grandma?”