Read The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life for Free Online Page A

way home. Mam was crying. Paw was crying. It was the worst thing they had ever had to do to their daughter.
    Ruthie went silent around our parents for several months—not from anger, as they suspected, but from shame that she had hurt them. “It just about killed her that she had caused them pain,” Mike says. “She had this deep sense of not wanting to hurt other people, not to be a burden to them.”
    My sister’s sensitivity and her loyalty to our parents only strengthened her bond with Mike. Mike was a deeply shy, introverted young man whose upbringing had been difficult, in part because of family finances, in part because his workaholic father was so emotionally and physically remote. Ruthie’s love built his confidence. “I knew I could trust her. She was so loyal. How can a person do that, especially at such a young age? But that was the kind of heart she had. Pure. It didn’t really matter if I saw her talking to another guy. It never bothered me, because I knew she was loyal to me. I never had to worry.”
    This purity of my sister’s heart gave Mike peace of mind when he joined the National Guard as a senior and, after finishing high school, shipped out to boot camp in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for four months of training. She wrote him every single day to encourage him,to tell him how much she loved him, and to keep him up on news from home.
    Ruthie spent that lonely summer working in our cousin’s law office in St. Francisville. “I’m making seven hundred dollars a month!” she told Mike. “Can you believe it? That’s a lot of money.”
    By that time I was between my freshman and sophomore semesters at LSU in Baton Rouge, and was home working a summer gig at the nuclear plant. There was no place I wanted to be less than stuck in Starhill. So I checked out. I’d come home from my nine-to-five job, make myself a tall glass of Tanqueray gin, grapefruit juice, and soda, and retire to my room to drink, read Hemingway, listen to ska, and marinate in self-doubt. To the rest of my family I looked like a self-centered, uppity layabout. There was no doubt some truth to that, but it was also the case that I was confused and drifting.
    Ruthie, though, may have been lonely, but she was rarely bored, and she doubted nothing about life. Everything she had, or could have, sufficed. She was the kind of person who would never grow up to write a memoir about her life because she was too happy and involved in living it. I didn’t want what Ruthie had, but I was jealous of the way she had it. How did she do it? She made everything look so effortless. On some mornings she would wake up at daylight and get a couple of hours in fishing for bass and bream on the pond before she went to the law office. On weekends she played golf with her and Mike’s buddies, babysat for extra money (she was already saving for her and Mike’s future), or went bowling with friends. She went to parties every now and then, but it didn’t feel right without Mike there.
    Ruthie and I got along surprisingly well that summer, no doubt because I stayed out of her way. One Saturday afternoon we drove into Baton Rouge to go shopping, and I told her about the dream I had the night before.
    “I dreamed that you and Mike got married,” I said. “Is that weird? Are y’all thinking about it?”
    “We’ve talked about it,” she said nervously, “but I think we’re going to wait until we get a few years of college behind us.”
    “Did I tell him the right thing?” she later asked Mike in a letter. “That’s one dream that I wish would come true! What I want most in life is to spend it with you. I love you more than anything in the world. I always daydream about what we’re gonna do on our honeymoon and what our house is gonna be like. I sure hope we can make my dreams come true…. I’m ready to start school and get it over with so we can hurry up and start our life together. It is gonna be a damn good one too! I can’t