Her father smiled. “See? You don’t need Harvard.”
Maybe leaving home was like what they say about dying, Sam thought, with snapshots of your life flashing before you.
She lifted from the train case the small bundle of new underpants, a gift from her mother’s best friend, Mardee. She set them aside and unrolled the picture Reilly had drawn for her. “To hang on your wall,” he’d told her last night. “So you won’t forget me.” Reilly had depicted himself as a head taller than Sam, with his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Nice try, shrimp,” she had said, pointing to his self-portrait as they sat on the edge of her bed. He’d laughed and bumped against her. “I will be bigger than you by the time you come home.” She’d fluffed his bushy red hair and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be home for Thanksgiving, you boob.”
She glanced at her sleeping brother. “Thank you, God,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping me protect Reilly from the worst of it.”
A newspaper clipping and drawing lined the bottom of the train case. She couldn’t part with them, and she sure didn’t want her mother to know she had them. For six years, Sam had held up her end of the unspoken agreement with her parents: That day had never happened to them, even though it had changed all of them.
She piled everything back into the case and closed the lid.
Ada Fetters walked to the kitchen table and set down her laundry basket with the sigh of an expired hope. The morning’s conversation with her youngest son grew heavier with each passing hour. I raised that boy to be better than this. I raised him, and I failed.
She walked to the window over the sink and searched for her husband. Wayne was stepping off the tractor, and she could hear him whistling for Sheba. The dog ran to Wayne’s side and leapt for the last piece of beef jerky in his hand. Wayne rubbed the dog’s head, and both of them turned toward the house with the red sun behind them, two shadows walking into bad news.
She went over to the stove and flipped the chicken pieces sizzling in the skillet, scraping bits of char from the sides. This pan had helped her raise four kids. She had cooked with it every day for more than forty years, and brandished it countless times to bring a shaky peace to the Fetters household.
Larry was the problem. Always had been. And now this.
Wayne pushed open the back door, followed by the tap-tap-tap of Sheba’s nails on the hardwood floor. “Go see Mommy,” he said, chuckling. “Go see what she’s got for ya.” The dog raced across the room and slid to a stop at the stove, her fat tail thumping against Ada’s legs.
“Sit,” Ada said. “Sit, girl.” She picked up the boiled chicken heart on the stove and popped it into the dog’s mouth.
Wayne walked up behind her and kissed her neck. “Anything for me?”
“Supper’s almost ready.” She wiped her hands on her apron and reached for the two plates they used every night for dinner, her mind full of the changes her husband didn’t even know were coming. She’d be stacking three plates soon, setting another place. She looked over at Wayne and let out a long, slow breath.
“What?” he said.
“Larry was here today,” she said, avoiding his eyes as she set down the plates.
“What’d he want this time?”
Ada almost started to chastise him, as she always did when they talked about their youngest child, but stopped herself. No point. No defense. Not this time. She pulled out two faded napkins from the basket in the middle of the table, slid one beside each plate, and added forks and knives.
“Ada, I asked you a question. What did Larry want?”
Ada silently rehearsed her lines one more time as she emptied the pot of boiling potatoes into a bowl and pulled out a tray of biscuits from the oven. She slid them into a basket lined with a checkered napkin, then reached for a platter and started scooping up the chicken with a fork.
“Larry and Alice are getting a divorce,” she said finally, without looking up. She set the platter of chicken on the table.
“Well, that’s hardly news, is it?” Wayne said, shifting in his chair. “Even Larry can’t stay married to a woman who’s decided her hobby’s being a whore.”
“It’s worse than that, Wayne,” Ada said, setting the pitcher on the table. “Alice was arrested. Found drunk and naked in the fountain in downtown Andover.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Ada pulled off her apron and sat down at the table. She folded her hands and bowed her head. Wayne sighed, put down his fork, and folded his hands, too. “Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and us to thy loving service,” Ada said. She glanced at Wayne. “And keep us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen.”
“Amen,” Wayne said as he poked a chicken thigh with his fork and dropped it on his plate. “What did Larry want today? Besides pity.”
“It’s about Ellie,” she said.
Wayne bit off a chunk of chicken. “What about Ellie?”
“Larry wants us to take her in.”
Wayne stopped chewing. “What?”
Ada set down her fork.
“What do you mean ‘take her in’? For how long?”
“For good, Wayne. Larry wants us to raise her.”
Wayne slammed a fist on the table. “Raise her! Raise her? We can raise her. And what about his other kids?”
Ada shrugged her shoulders. “Well, Larry’s got a lady friend, as it turns out. Name’s Florence. They want to get married. She likes little Chrissy and Beth, but she thinks Ellie’s too old.”
“Ellie is only eight,” Wayne said.
“Old enough to grow up remembering when Florence wasn’t her mother, I guess.”
“So, he’s just gonna dump her?”
“No, honey,” Ada said, locking eyes with him. “We’re going to welcome her into our home. We’re going to raise her.”
Wayne slammed his fist on the table again, but Ada did not flinch. He was angry, but he was just making noise. In nearly forty years of marriage, Wayne had never raised a hand to her.
“We’re done raising children, Ada. I’m sixty, and you’re fifty-six, for Christ’s sake.”
“She’s our granddaughter, Wayne. Either we take her, or strangers are going to raise her. Think about that. Our Ellie with a bunch of people we don’t know. What kind of people adopt a seven-year-old girl? Who knows what they’d do to her?”
Wayne pushed his plate away and threw his napkin on it. “I’ll be damned.”