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IGA, where she had bought chocolate cookies and bananas. In her estimation a person 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 builttogether 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