The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern
I did not raise my voice. I said it the way I’d read out a list of names for the church directory.
“I’m not telling you to be unkind to him,” I said. “I’m telling you what happened, since you asked. I won’t say it’s all right. It isn’t.”
Marilyn Dorsch, who has never to my knowledge said a sharp word, put both arms around me in front of the coffee urn. Behind her, Jean from the bank stood by the cake table with her eyes full, and gave me one small nod.
What the town did was quiet, and I believe it was worse.
On Monday, Randy went back to the co-op, because a man has to work. Larry Hudson, the manager, did not fire him. I have the rest from Larry, who came by with a sack of seed potatoes and his hat in his hand.
There are two registers at Dunmore Farm Supply, one up front where Randy worked, one at the back by the hardware. Larry says the farmers came in that week the way they always do, and every one of them looked at Randy’s register, and walked to the back and waited in the other line, even when it was five deep. Not a word.
At the Veterans of Foreign Wars post, where Elmer’s old Army friend Lloyd Hendricks, eighty-four, goes every Thursday for the fish fry, the men quit saving Randy a chair. Lloyd came by the house in his good hat and stood on my porch.
“Oleta,” he said. “Elmer was the best man I knew. I won’t have that boy at the post until he’s made it right by you. If you need a ride or a repair, there’s twelve of us. Just say.”
I told him there was a step loose on the back porch. He had it fixed by Saturday, with two other men and a level, and none of them would take a dime.
Randy came on the second Sunday afternoon.
I saw his truck from the kitchen window. He parked in the street and sat in it with the engine off for a quarter of an hour. Then he came up the walk, and he was thinner.
I let him knock. I let him knock a second time.
I opened the door and did not step back to let him through.
“Mom.”
“Randy.”
“Can I come in?”
“You can sit on the porch swing. I’ll bring you a glass of tea.”
He sat on the swing, a grown man of fifty-five with his hands hanging between his knees. I brought the tea. I sat in the straight chair across from him, not close, and folded my hands, and waited, because I had learned from my sister that silence does the work.
He drank half the tea and put the glass down.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“You might start with the truth.”
“I’m behind.” He laughed, one ugly breath. “Kayla’s mother’s place is thirty-two hundred a month, and I took out a loan in January that Kayla doesn’t know I took, and it’s gone. I told myself the trip would fix everything. That if I could give her one big good thing, she’d see the man she married.”
“And you thought of my book.”