Carly used to say Elsie was the easy one. She said it with love, at first. She said it the way you'd say, thank God for small mercies. Elsie slept through the night at four months. Elsie potty-trained herself. Elsie could be handed a book and a juice box in a hospital waiting room and would sit for three hours without complaint while a nurse came out every forty minutes to say they were still in there. Elsie is so easy. Elsie never needs anything. I heard Carly say it to her sister on the phone, to the women at church, to the pediatrician. I said it myself. I said it to the guys in the engine room when they asked about my kids. My son's a handful, but my daughter, my daughter's easy.
I didn't know yet that there is a kind of easy that is just a child who has stopped asking.
The picnic started at eleven. My boat had come in to the ore docks at Two Harbors at four in the morning, and by the time the shipyard people had looked at the weld and the company had told us we'd be laid up for at least a week and a half, and I'd gotten a ride down the shore with our first mate, who lived in Lakeside too, it was after ten. I didn't call. I wanted to surprise them. I had my duffel bag over my shoulder and I walked up the hill from London Road with the lake behind me, gray-blue and calm, and the lilacs still going in people's yards, that heavy purple smell that means it's finally, really June in Duluth. I was happy. I remember that. I want to remember it, because it was the last uncomplicated minute of that whole summer.
I came around the side of the school by the bike racks. The field was full. Little kids ran everywhere in matching green T-shirts that said LAKEVIEW FIELD DAY 2026 on the front. There was a sack race going on, and a parachute game, the kind where everybody holds the edge of a big rainbow circle of nylon and makes it bloom up into the air. There was a sound system set up on a little platform by the gym door, playing country songs that cut out every few seconds when the wind hit the microphone.
I stopped by the back of the bleachers, by the baseball backstop, because I wanted to find them before they found me. I wanted to see their faces. I found Carly first. She was at a table near the kindergarten area, under one of those blue pop-up canopies, and she was wearing the yellow sundress I liked, and her hair was up, and she was setting out cupcakes.
They weren't just any cupcakes. Carly had always been good at that kind of thing. They were frosted in blue and green, Finn's soccer colors, and every one of them had a little plastic soccer ball stuck in the top, and there was a big sign she'd made on poster board, propped against the canopy pole, that said HAPPY 6TH BIRTHDAY FINN!! in glitter letters. The kindergarten class was gathered around the table in a crowd, sixteen or eighteen little kids in green shirts, and in the middle of them, like the sun, was my son. Finn was wearing a paper crown. He was bouncing on his toes. Carly was laughing at something he said.
I almost walked out then. I almost went to them right then, and if I had, I don't know what would have happened. I think nothing would have happened. I think I'd have hugged Carly and picked Finn up and he'd have screamed my name and everyone would have clapped, the sailor home from the sea, and I'd have eaten a cupcake, and I'd never have seen it. I think about that more than I'd like to.
But I didn't walk out, because just then I saw Elsie.
She was coming across the field from the second-grade area, which was down by the far soccer goal, near the fence, where the field sloped toward the woods. She was by herself. She was wearing the same green shirt as everybody else, but it was a size too big, and she'd knotted it at the side the way the older girls did. Her hair was in two braids, and one of them was coming loose. She had grass stains on her knees and a sticker on her cheek, a gold one, and she was walking the way she always walked when she wanted something, which was slowly, giving herself time to change her mind.