Eleven Girls on a Trailer Floor
The longest night
We live in Cottonwood Court, on the east edge of a Kansas town of about nineteen hundred people, an hour south of Wichita. There are twenty-two lots, a gravel loop, a row of cottonwoods along the creek.
Ours is lot 14. It is a 1998 single-wide, sixteen feet by seventy-six, cream with brown trim. Ryan and I bought it outright five years ago with his overtime money and my tax refund, and we have not missed a lot rent payment since.
I keep yellow mums in two whiskey barrels by the steps. Ryan built the porch himself out of treated lumber, with a rail and a ramp on one end so my mother could get in after her knee surgery. It is not a mansion. It is a home, and it is paid for.
I knocked on Kaylee’s door and let myself in. She was lying face down across her bed with her shoes still on, and she had pulled her grandma’s crocheted afghan off the end of the bed and shoved it away from her.
“I don’t want to get it wet,” she said into the pillow. “Grandma made it.”
That about broke me in half. My girl was crying her heart out and still thinking about not ruining a blanket somebody had made her.
I sat down on the floor by the bed, because there isn’t room in that bedroom for a chair, and I put my hand on her back. She shook under it like a little bird.
“Is it because of our house?” she asked after a while.
“That’s what Mrs. Hanson said,” I told her. “But it’s not a true reason, baby. It’s a scared reason. Grown people get scared of things that aren’t real.”
“Addison’s been here a hundred times,” Kaylee said. “She slept over here in third grade. She ate your tacos.”
“I know she did.”
“I’ve been to every one of her birthdays. Every one since kindergarten.”
That was true too. Six birthday parties. A bounce house, a bowling alley in Wichita, a pool party where Kaylee got sunburned on the backs of her knees, a craft party, a movie party, and last year a backyard campout in a tent. Kaylee had saved her allowance every single year to buy the present herself.
On our refrigerator there is a picture of the two of them at five years old in matching yellow raincoats, both missing the same front tooth.
I stayed on that floor. Kaylee cried, and stopped, and cried again. Around eleven she fell asleep for about twenty minutes, then woke up and remembered, and it started all over.
Ryan comes home
My husband, Ryan, works second shift at an aircraft parts plant in Wichita, three in the afternoon to eleven thirty at night. He gets home a little before one, smelling like cutting oil, and usually eats a cold supper standing up at the counter.
That night he found the kitchen dark and the skillet still in the sink, and he came looking for me. I heard his boots stop in the doorway of Kaylee’s room.
“What happened?” he whispered.
I told him in about four sentences, out in the hall. He listened with his jaw working. Ryan is not a talker. He is the kind of man who fixes your brakes before you know they were squealing.
“You want me to call Jeff?” he asked. Jeff Hanson is Addison’s father. He and Ryan played football together a hundred years ago, and they still nod at each other at the Co-op.
“No,” I said. “Not tonight. I don’t want this to turn into two men in a gravel driveway.”
He nodded. He didn’t argue. He went into Kaylee’s room and sat on the other edge of her bed in his work clothes, and he rubbed her back in slow circles the way he did when she was a baby with an earache.
He didn’t say one word about Courtney Hanson. He said, “I’ve got you, sis,” the nickname he gave her when she was two. And after a while Kaylee reached back without lifting her head and held on to two of his fingers.
She finally fell asleep for good a little after three in the morning. Ryan covered her up with the afghan, very carefully, and we both went to bed for about an hour and a half.