Then a boy from the kindergarten class came running back, a big red-haired kid with frosting on his chin, and said, "Can I have another one?" and Carly laughed and said, "Well, since you asked so nicely, Tucker," and handed him the last cupcake.
Elsie watched it go. She watched it all the way into his hand and up to his mouth. Then she turned around and walked back across the field toward the second-grade area, slowly, with her hands still behind her back, still holding her wrist, and she did not look back once.
I stood behind the backstop with my duffel bag on my shoulder and I couldn't move. I want to tell you I charged over there. I didn't. I stood there with something going on in my chest that I didn't have a name for, and what I was thinking, God help me, was: maybe I missed something. Maybe she'd already had one. Maybe there was some rule, some reason, something that happened earlier that I didn't see. That's what being gone does to you. You lose your standing to be sure of anything in your own house. You get used to deferring to the person who's there.
Then I thought about the word. Okay. The way she said it. She didn't say it like a kid who'd been told no. She said it like a kid who'd known the answer before she asked and had only asked to be sure. She said it like it was a thing she'd said a hundred times.
I put my duffel bag down against the backstop and I went after my daughter.
She'd gone back to the far end of the field, down by the fence where the second-grade tables were, but she hadn't gone back to the tables. She was sitting by herself on the low concrete wall that ran along the bottom of the field where it met the woods, with her knees pulled up and her chin on them, watching a sack race she wasn't in. Her class was clustered around their teacher's table about twenty yards away, eating something out of paper boats. Elsie wasn't eating anything.
I came down the slope behind her, and I don't know what I expected. I think I expected her to run to me. That's what she'd always done before, when I came home, at the airport in the old days when I flew back from wherever the boat laid up, or at the door on Robinson Street. She'd run and jump and I'd catch her. But when she heard me and turned around, her face did something I'd never seen it do. It went bright, for half a second, and then it went careful. Like she was checking whether she was allowed to be glad.
"Dad?"
"Hey, Elsie-girl."