I started looking for Daddy as soon as the car turned onto the road our old house was on. I figured Daddy had stayed in the house while we were away, and he might still be there, at least for a little while. We drove up in the blue Plymouth, the dark blue Plymouth that Mama bought in Missouri, with the big orange U-haul trailer behind it. Mama was in the front seat driving. Andy sat at Mama's right because he was the youngest, and he got to sit beside her in the front seat mostly. Andy was four now because he had his birthday in August, just before Mama got out of that hospital where she went when she had her nervous breakdown, just before Mama came and picked us up from the Follis's farm in Missouri to bring us back to Yakima. I was the only one that didn't have a birthday before she came to pick us up. In November I would be nine, but now our ages were four, six, eight and ten. Bobby was ten, Lindsay was six.

Bobby and Lindsay sat in the back beside me. We had to change around who got the window, but right now Bobby sat at the left side window and I sat at the right. I watched our house as Mama drove the last ways to it up the street, West 76th Avenue. The tires crunched and little rocks pinged against the bottom of the car, as Mama drove up the gravel road, pulled up and parked the car in front of the house, on the side of the road, pulling up farther to get the trailer parked too. As Mama parked the car I looked for signs of Daddy. No other car parked in the front - that was a bad sign. No one coming out of the front door, hearing the car parking and running out from the living room where he had been waiting for us. He could be busy. Daddy could be fixing things, just one more thing before we arrived. Give him a minute.

The house was the same. It still had the white picket fence that Daddy built around the front yard, and the cement porch. The door and the screen door were both closed. The curtains were closed over the picture window in the living room so I couldn't see in, couldn't see if Daddy sat there in the easy chair, maybe fallen asleep after working so hard the day before to get everything just right before we came. Maybe Mama was waiting for Daddy to come out and say hello, but Daddy didn't come.

Mama leaned over Andy, unlocked his door, pulled on his handle and opened it. Mama got out herself on the left side, walked around the car and closed Andy's door after Andy got out.

I opened my door and got out, and Bobby got out of his, because Mama didn't say, get out on the curb side The road was a gravel road and hardly any cars drove down it. We didn't have to worry so much about traffic in Yakima. Lindsay slid over across the plastic seat and got out on my side, shut the car door after her, but she didn't lock it. Mama didn't say to lock the car door, not in Yakima.

Mama got a key out of her purse, her soft black purse, not her black shiny dress up purse, to unlock the front door. She didn't knock for Daddy to let us in. Mama pushed the door open and the living room looked just the same as we left it, the dull green couch under the picture window, with the matching easy chair against the wall to the right and one of the end tables with the lamp in the corner between them. The coffee table in front of the couch, and the big TV, not portable like the one Mama bought in Missouri, against the opposite wall. The beige rug on the floor. On the wall above the TV set the picture of an avenue with lines of trees on both sides getting smaller and smaller in the distance. But Daddy wasn't there watching the TV turned up loud, so loud he didn't hear the car coming up the gravel road, or the key turning in the lock.

*

As soon as I could I went out to the back. In the back yard were the swing set, slide and sandbox that Daddy made for us a long time ago, before I was even old enough to go to school, the sandbox filled with sand from the sand works that we had all ridden out in the car to get. I sat in a swing, a board painted white, hung with rope. I put my hands around the rope and pulled back, pumped the swing once or twice to try it out again, then I let it slow down, and leaned way back to look at the sky and back still farther, letting my head hang back loose, to see the upside down row of tall slim trees marking out the boundary of our yard from the empty lot behind it, and I stayed that way leaning way back, until the swing settled down to nothing, stayed there even longer, feeling a little dizzy, but not like I could fall off, no, like I'd never fall off, not here, not home, not in Yakima.

On my way back inside I stopped to look at the back porch. Daddy built the porch, shoveling cement out of a cement truck into a frame he'd made, leveling it with a rake and a hoe and a flat tool with a handle. Before the porch dried, Daddy had called all of us kids, had each of us press a hand and a foot into the wet cement, four handprints, four footprints, and below them Daddy wrote with a stick our names, Bobby, Sandy, Lindsay, and Andy, and "1958."

I touched the print of my foot, felt each toe mark separate from the foot, felt the rough concrete of the ball of my foot and the heel. With one finger, I traced over the path of the stick that Daddy had used to write my name, traced every letter S - A - N - D - Y. I spread out my hand, put my 1960 hand over the 1958 hand. My fingers spread out way past where my 1958 fingers had gone. I let them spread, didn't try to scrunch them up to match the old shape, because there was no way at all that my 1960 hand was going to fit into 1958.