The house is smaller than I remember, again. Dad stoops as he comes through the door from the hallway into the kitchen. The ceiling brushes the top of Mom’s head as she stirs the pot on the stove, the hairs that have come loose from her bun swaying and stretching, static energy pulling them up to touch the plaster. My boots hang over the edge of the rubber mat by the door when I toe them off, dripping water onto the wood in puddles that spread, obscenely large against the miniaturizing grain. Does it happen when I put my hand to the doorknob, in that instant between entering and eyes focusing? Or as soon as I turn onto the drive, cross the property line? Are they caught in the sway of it, rocked out of their routines? Or is it just a shudder, an unnoticed twitch?
Dad looks at his watch, eyebrows raised, as if he’s forgotten that I was coming. Mom sets the spoon on the rest and brushes her hands on her skirt. “Samantha,” she says. “You made it.” She crosses the room in three strides and embraces me, the swiftness and tightness the only outward sign that she’s glad I’ve come. She feels bird-light in my arms, miniature bones I could crush if I squeezed too hard. She hasn’t shrunk, has always been small, but I can’t help but be careful, as if I am too big for her now, too.
***
“You still go home?” Mary asked me, when I told her last week where I was going. She traced a finger up my side as we lay in bed. I could stretch spread-eagle and not touch the edges of the mattress. I snuggled closer to her, pulled the covers tight around us.
“Just once a year. It’s not too bad.” Not yet.
But she shook her head. “I haven’t been home in years. Last time it was just. . . I could see it happening, you know?”
“It’s slow, so far.”
“Still. I don’t know how you bear it.”
I pushed my nose against her collarbone and inhaled, salt and laundry and something indescribable and alive. “It would be worse not to go.”
She was silent, and I could hear the reproach in it. I pulled back to look at her. “They want me to come. They beg me.”
“There was one guy I knew, back home—he never left.”
Of course there was. There was someone in every town. “And is that what we should all do, then? Never leave, and hope we don’t outgrow them?”
“No, of course not. I’m not saying that. Just. . . we made the choice, you know?”
“They want me to come,” I said again. “It’s their choice too.”
***
The bed that swallowed me as a child now makes me bend my knees to keep my ankles from draping over the footboard. I try to lay across it as I did a decade ago, pull the covers around myself and imagine falling asleep, the easy doze of the young surrounded by everything they’ve ever known. But the blanket doesn’t reach my edges, and I can feel the bounce of the mattress, like it wants to tip me out onto the floor. After a moment I sit up and smooth the wrinkles out of my clothes.
***
Dad and I sit in the backyard while Mom cooks. Beer in his hand, wine in mine, that peaceful, awkward silence stretching between us. The trees have crept closer, left less space between the back porch and their dark branches. Dad says he doesn’t mind, it’s less lawn to mow—a blessing, really, as he gets older. “Don’t have the back to push that old thing over acres.” I don’t bother to suggest he could get a riding mower, or hire someone. It’s not the point.
He only mentions once that I could stay, and he doesn’t come at it directly. “House could be yours,” he says, looking at the trees instead of at me. “Paid off, you know.”
“It might not even work.” There are stories, of course—the prodigal child returns, embraces their old life, realizes what they were missing was home all along, and hey presto, no more shrinking. But I’ve never known a case in real life. And what damage would I do before we all accepted that I just don’t fit anymore?
“Well, it’s always an option.”
“You could leave, you know. Come to the city. Come to stay with me.”
He blinks at me, as if genuinely baffled. “Why would we leave our home?”
“You don’t have to leave forever. Just come visit. I could show you around.”
“I don’t think we’d fit there,” he says, with not an ounce of irony. I laugh, and he smiles. “It’s alright, you know. We’re okay here.”
***
At dinner I eat three cups of stew, the bowls almost small enough for me to circle with one hand. My parents only eat one each, and insist that’s enough for them. I don’t know whether it’s habit, or acclimation, or an out-sized view of my needs, and it’s only when I’m on my third bowl that I wonder whether I should limit myself, match their restraint. But by then it’s too late.
When we’ve all finished, Dad gets up to do the dishes, and it’s Mom’s turn to sit with me. She comes at it more directly.
“It’s not the same without you here,” she says, unnecessarily. We’re sitting at a kitchen table that bumps against my knees, in chairs that feel child-sized. She wants accountability, empathy, not silence, so I put my hand over hers.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “We were never big enough for you, even when you were a kid.”
I can see the tense way Dad’s shoulders are set, the way he is studiously not listening, but still hearing.
“It was never you, Mom. I just needed something different. Somewhere different.” Somewhere my own.
“And you found it out there?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“But you will,” she says, suddenly on my side, that lightning-quick switch only parents can make, from guilt to support. She nods and stands, and the oven timer goes off, the timing so perfect I wonder if she planned it that way. Dad hands her oven mitts without interrupting his rinsing, without even turning around, their dance perfect and choreographed. She jams the mitts over too-big hands, opens the oven door with her head already down, so that her glasses fog all over with steam. She pulls out two miniature cakes, sets them on top of the stove. “You’ll find a place you fit.”
***
I leave after dessert, and they don’t suggest I should stay over. I hug them again, tight this time. I walk out the door and don’t turn around, don’t look to see if they’re waving, or watching. But as my car bumps down the dusty road, I give in, once, looking up to watch the house shrinking in the rearview.
Katie ten Hagen is a children's book editor who lives in Maryland with a dog, four birds, two geckos, and a fridge full of cheese.