Wanda Part 4

Yard cats gather at the backdoor to wait for a handout. Ruby puts on the coffeepot and stirs up a batch of buttermilk biscuits. Marvin brings in the milk and strains it into a gallon jar. Just a normal day, except it isn’t. They can’t remember a time when it was or imagine that it will ever be again.

In the beginning making the missing person report and calling all of her friends and talking to the neighbors gave them hope. Time passed and that hope faded, replaced by numbness and the necessity of getting on with life. Friends quit asking if there was any news. Daisy started first grade and they went back to church twice on Sunday.

It happened so quickly, this disintegration of their life. One minute they’re laughing and playing cards and the next they are frantically searching the house, the barn, the small pond at the back of the cornfield. The Sheriff’s men make plaster molds of the tire tracks that cross the shallow ditch adjacent to the pasture next door. No one says out loud what is on their minds.