The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern
They did not board the Honolulu flight. Kayla went to the counter and bought three tickets home on her own credit card, eleven hundred and forty dollars.
Randy flew home two rows behind them with his head in his hands. I was in my own bed by then, in the house on Pecan Street, with my suitcase by the door and Fern asleep in the spare room with her shoes on.
Three days later, Kayla’s car pulled up to my house in the middle of the afternoon.
She had not slept, I could see that. She came up the walk with Hannah on one side and Cody on the other, and she stopped at the foot of my porch steps and could not come up.
“Mom Oleta,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I did not know.”
I came down the steps. It took a while, my knee. I put my arms around her. “I know you didn’t,” I said. “Come inside.”
We sat in the kitchen. Fern was there in her apron, making a coffee cake, because Fern believes in coffee cake the way some people believe in the Resurrection. Kayla told me about the loan and the truck, and the calls that had come to the house since spring, the ones he always took out to the yard. She did not make excuses for him.
“He’s staying at his brother’s in Sedalia,” she said. “For now. I don’t know what comes after. I’m not asking you to forgive him. I just wanted you to hear from me that none of us knew.”
Cody had been sitting on the stool by the stove, quiet. Now he went out to the car and came back with a plain white envelope in both hands, with Grandma printed on it in careful pencil.
Inside were fourteen dollars and thirty cents in ones and quarters and dimes, and a note on notebook paper.
Grandma. This is for the ocean. It is all my allowance. I will get you more. Love Cody.
I read it standing at my kitchen counter. Not one dollar of those thirty thousand had ever made my heart do what that fourteen dollars did. I put it in a Mason jar on the windowsill over the sink, where I could see it.
The first Sunday after, I went to church, and Fern drove me. Kayla and the children were in their usual pew, third from the front, and Randy’s seat at the end was empty, and the whole congregation of Dunmore Methodist could count. By Saturday, everybody had some version of it, and not one version was right.
I stood in the fellowship hall afterward by the coffee urn, and Marilyn Dorsch, the pastor’s wife, came up with her hands clasped and said, “Oleta, dear, we’ve all been hearing such things. Is everything all right with you and Randy? How was Hawaii?”
For seventy years I had answered that kind of question one way. “Oh, we decided not to go, it’s all fine, don’t you worry.” I would have covered for him, and for me, and for the whole smooth surface of the Methodist church.
I set down my coffee.
“Marilyn,” I said. “I didn’t go to Hawaii. I gave my son thirty thousand dollars I had saved for ten years, and he left me at the St. Louis airport without a ticket and went on the trip with his family. An airline agent named Marcy sat down with me at four in the afternoon, after she had brought me water at one. Kayla and the children turned around in Denver when they heard. They didn’t know. I’d ask you to say that, because people have been unfair to Kayla.”