could live on bananas for a meal and cookies for desert. She noted then on the counter a big bucket of fried chicken and a container of potato salad. With a small slice of alarm over possible food poisoning, she put the potato salad in the refrigerator.
The phone rang, and all of them jumped. Parker was the first to reach the receiver hanging on the wall. “James house,” he answered in an uncharacteristically clipped tone.
They all stared at him, not a breath being breathed. He said, “Hmmm…okay,” and hung up then said, “That was Neville. He said they haven’t found Willie Lee, but they have talked to five people who saw him this afternoon. He was definitely heading this way home.”
Marilee wished she had talked to the sheriff herself. Hearing his voice would have been something. Then she imagined the sheriff telling her that they were searching all the drainage culverts.
“Where is he?”
They all stared helplessly at her. She swung around and pushed out the back screen door and down the steps to the yard, hardly realizing what she was doing.
Please, Lord, bring my baby home. I will do anything. Please, Lord…just please. How will I bear it if you take him from me? If anything happens to him…
Thankfully, those in the kitchen knew her well enough to let her go alone. She went to the foot of the tree that housed the little fort Marilee and Willie Lee had built together and looked upward. She did not cry. She never cried in a crisis. As she saw it, crying had never changed anything, and if she cried, then all would be lost.
She went to the rabbit cages and realized it was way past time the two rabbits inside were fed their evening meal. She got their food from the garage and filled their dishes, changing their water, too. She thought how Willie Lee loved animals. He seemed more comfortable with them than with people.
As she stood gazing at the rabbits, a squeal sounded…the familiar squeal of the gate in the back fence.
She whirled around to see a man coming through the gate. A tall man…Charlotte had said Tate Holloway…
Then she saw, standing beside the man, her much smaller son.
“This boy says he lives here,” the man said.
“Oh, my…Willie Lee!”
It was not until that instant of seeing the small boy’s figure and then her eyes falling on his upturned face that she realized she had truly begun to believe she would never see Willie Lee alive again, and that what she had been wrestling with all these hours was the inner imagining of his limp little body being pulled from some muddy ditch.
But here he was, his blond hair standing on end and his blue eyes peering out from his thick glasses, regarding her calmly.
“Hey, Ma-ma.”
She had scooped him against her. He pushed away and put a hand on her cheek, looking deep into her eyes.
“Why are you cry-ing, Ma-ma?”
“Because I missed you…” She was crying so hard that she could hardly speak. “I didn’t know where you were, and I’ve been so scared, because you were lost.”
She hugged him close again.
“I was not lost,” he said, again pushing away to look at her with his dear blue eyes blinking behind his glasses. “I was com-ing home.”
“Oh, honey…” She caressed his dear, unruly hair, so glad for the feel of it. “It is a long way from school. You shouldn’t come home all by yourself.”
“I was not all by my-self. I had Mun-ro with me.”
For an instant of confusion, Marilee thought he meant the man, but then he was reaching to bring forward a dog. A shaggy, spotted small type of shepherd.
“Mun-ro,” Willie Lee introduced happily.
The man was Tate Holloway, which was a little surprising, but not so much, because Marilee had recognized his deep Southern drawl. He explained that he had been looking around his cousin’s house and had discovered Willie Lee sleeping on the wicker settee on the porch, with the dog and a big orange cat that had, as Mr. Holloway put it, “skeddaddled faster than a hog skatin’ on ice.”
Tate Holloway’s voice was as it had been when Marilee had spoken to him on the phone, all deep and smoky, and he drew his words out like he purely enjoyed each one on his tongue.
“Bub-ba,” Willie Lee said, turning concerned eyes up to her. “I was going to feed Bub-ba, but his food is all gone, and he ran away from us.”
Understanding dawned as to what had brought Willie Lee home by way of the back gate. “We’ve been going through the gate each night to feed Bubba on the back step,” Marilee explained. “Bubba is—or was—Ms. Porter’s cat. We’ve been feeding him until you came. She said you got the cat with the house.”
Willie Lee said, “Bub-ba needs food.”
“We’ll let Mr. Holloway take Bubba some of this chicken,” Marilee told him.
They all sat around the big oak table in Marilee’s kitchen, eating the meal friends had brought earlier. It was very much like a party. Marilee kept Willie Lee sitting on her lap, where she could repeatedly touch him. On one side, within touching distance whether she wished it or not, sat Corrine, who seemed to grin an awfully lot for her, and on the other side, with his arm often on the back of Marilee’s chair, sat Parker. Aunt Vella hovered, a good hostess attending everyone. Marilee soaked up this time of contentment, of safety after threat.
“I was going to call you,” Tate Holloway said, having gone over the story a second time and embellishing with how Miss Charlotte had taken him to task for coming before his scheduled Saturday arrival and how surprised he had been to see a boy on his settee.
“I had your telephone number, but Willie Lee here—” he winked and pointed at Willie Lee with a chicken leg “—said he would show me the way over. I sure wondered where he was goin’ when he led me into those cedar trees, but by golly, there was the gate right in the midst of those ramblin’ roses, just like he said.”
Marilee, putting warm chicken meat in her mouth with her fingers, watched the man and her son grin at each other. Tate Holloway had a charming grin.
“I knew the way. I was not lost,” Willie Lee said. Then he looked at Marilee, squinting with one eye behind his thick glasses. “Well, oncet I was lost, but Mun-ro led me home.”
Taking a roll from his and Marilee’s plate, he slipped from her lap and went to feed it to the dog lying on the spiral rug in front of the sink, as was the right of a dog who had protected her son.
Marilee, approving of how gently the dog ate from her son’s hand, felt a sinking feeling. “Honey, Munro may belong to someone. He has a collar.”
Willie Lee said, “No…he was look-ing for me, to come live here. I told God I want-ed him. Re-mem-ber?”
Marilee glanced at Parker.
“I don’t think I’ve seen that dog before,” Parker said. “But not everybody ‘round here brings me their pets. Most, but not everyone. And he doesn’t have any tags…may not have had a rabies shot,” he added as caution.
Everyone looked at the dog, who blinked his kind eyes.
Tate Holloway said, “You just can’t separate a boy and a dog, oncet they’ve chosen each other,” and winked at Willie Lee. “Plain secret of life is a good dog.”
Now Marilee knew where Willie Lee had picked up saying “oncet.”
“How come you to name him Munro, Willie Lee?” Aunt Vella asked.
“That is his name.”
At this good sense, all of them chuckled, except Corrine, who had begun to help Aunt Vella clear the table