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Ruby had gotten good grades. She’d volunteered at the historical society exhaustively, from the time she was thirteen years old all the way up until she graduated. Her relevant community service and the essays that she’d written about it were exemplary. And she could only credit the influence of her mother for that.
Andie McKee was meticulous, loving and strict all at once.
Ruby picked up the pace then, letting her suitcase sway as she ran, holding on to her dress and keeping her boots from getting tangled up in the long hem as she ran up the pitted driveway to the front porch.
She stopped at the bottom step, breathing hard. Then she walked up and knocked on the door. It was early, but she knew her parents were awake. Likely had been for a while. They might be in their sixties, but you didn’t retire from farm life.
The front door opened, and her mom stopped, still wiping her hands on her apron. “Ruby,” she said, throwing her arms out and pulling her in for a hug.
She pushed Ruby back, examining her, and Ruby did some examining of her own. The last time she’d been home had been six months ago, for Mac’s funeral, and then she’d seen her parents, Dahlia and Marianne at her graduation five months ago. And of course, her mother looked much the same. But there was something about all the spaces between visits that made her start to picture her mom as she’d been when Ruby had been a kid.
She never pictured her with all these lines on her face, with her hair more gray than light brown. She seemed smaller somehow, as if each passing year had taken something from her.
But when she looked at her mother’s eyes, she didn’t get that sense. Because the joy in her eyes shone as brightly as it ever had.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming so early?”
“I changed my flight last night,” Ruby said, wandering into the small, well-worn kitchen. It was clean, meticulously so, and it was in almost unbelievably good working order. The appliances were not new, neither were the cabinets, neither was the floor or the counter. But her father kept everything in such a well-maintained state, that it was as if she had walked back in time, into the kitchen as it had been in the 1950s.
Her father had never liked modern appliances, preferring the original wood-burning stove and an old-fashioned furnace. Air-conditioning had been a foreign concept in Ruby’s life until she had started going and visiting friends’ houses. The one concession he’d made was getting a more modernized refrigerator.
Even he had to admit that there was a better way than an icebox.
“Well, we would’ve come to get you.” Her mother opened the fridge and took out a bottle of orange juice, then retrieved a loaf from the bread box. Each movement decisive and economical as she put a slice of bread in the toaster.
“I know, Mom,” Ruby said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Because I didn’t want you getting up and driving to Medford. Anyway, it was easy to get a car.”
Pear Blossom was almost an hour away from the larger town of Medford, the hub that many people used for hospitals and big box shopping. And for the airport. Ruby had never spent much time there.
Going mostly for special trips when some of her friends had convinced her mom that going shopping at the mall was an important rite of passage.
Andie preferred to get everything she could from Pear Blossom. It wasn’t part of that local movement or anything like that. Her parents had a deep sense of community, and they always had. Along with a lot of practicality. Even if small, local businesses couldn’t sell things for as cheap as a big box store, by the time they drove to go pick up an item, by the time they expended the time and the gas, and put money in the pockets of a stranger rather than a neighbor, it all truly didn’t seem worth it. Ruby’s meals had been farm-to-table far before it was cool.
“Did you just get in from England?”
“Yesterday.”
“You must be dead on your feet. Put down your suitcase and go get some sleep.” Then the toast popped up and her mom put it on a plate, slathered it in butter and set it on the table. In direct opposition to her words, she clearly thought Ruby needed food before sleep.
She took a juice cup down from the cabinet, and Ruby interrupted that. “I’ll take some coffee. I can’t go to sleep. I need to stay up. Otherwise I’m never going to get back on the right time zone.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I start at the historical society in a few days,” Ruby said.
“In a few days.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to let the grass grow under my feet. To sleep when I could just as easily power through and acclimate.”
“You sound like your father.”
“Who sounds like me?” Jed McKee walked into the room then, putting a hat over his bald head. His face had the set look of a man who smiled sparingly, but when he saw Ruby, the change was immediate. “Well, as I live and breathe.”
“Good to see you, Dad,” she said.
She found herself swept nearly off her feet as she was pulled in for a big hug, a decisive kiss dropped on her cheek. “Good to see you, kiddo. And you’re back with us. For keeps now.”
“Yeah,” she said. She waited for a sense of claustrophobia or failure or something to settle over her. But it didn’t.
