Retirement Plan by Martha Miller

from school in tears. She tossed her Cinderella lunch bucket on the counter and headed straight for her upstairs room. Sophie found her there, her face buried in a pillow, sobbing.
    Sophie crossed the room and sat on the bed next to her. “What is the matter?”
    “Go away,” Ruby had said.
    Sophie stroked Ruby’s smooth, dark hair. “What could be so bad?”
    Ruby raised her head, took the tissue that Sophie offered, then said, “We’re awfully alone in this world, aren’t we?”
    Sophie was astonished to hear this from an eight-year-old. The students in her fifth-grade class weren’t that articulate. Admittedly Ruby was a bit more mature than the average, but the “alone in this world” might have come from a much older person—if it came at all. Sophie told her, “You’re not alone, babyluv. You’ve got a family that loves you and cares for you.”
    “But nobody at school likes me.”
    There. That was a statement from an eight-year-old. “Sugar, a good family trumps all the kids at school because a family is for always. No matter what happens, your family, your mother and me, well, we’ve got your back.”
     Ruby embraced her then; her moist cheeks were warm against Sophie’s throat as the child made a long, shuddering sound. Sophie was fairly certain that some snot was saturating her dry-clean-only cardigan, but that didn’t matter. Sophie then said the thing that had reached across all those years to her. “Here’s the deal. When you have a family, home is a place you can come, and no matter what, we’ll always take you in.”
    Sophie stood then, lifting Ruby with her. Ruby’s quick heart beat next to her own. Her daughter, whose slender body was as light as a paper kite, clung to Sophie’s neck while she wrapped her legs around Sophie’s hips. That day, a cup of lemon-and-honey tea had defused the crisis.
    But Ruby began to ask the hard questions. Why does everyone else have a father?  Do I have a real father? Who was my real mother? What were my real parents like? Lois had concocted a story that satisfied Ruby for a while. It was a curious weaving of facts and fiction. She was born in a medic tent on the outskirts of Saigon. Her mother was a beautiful Vietnamese woman, who worked as a nurse there, and her father was a soldier (as he probably was), and they were both killed by a mortar attack when Ruby was a week old.
    Yet no matter how many times Ruby heard the story and how much love she was given at home, when she went out into the big world, she learned a new truth. She was different and her family was different. As the time passed, she learned to keep quiet about her mothers. But she couldn’t hide her race. In the years following the war, the Vietnamese were hated. All through grade school, she’d been the only nonwhite student.
    Lois and Sophie had been living together for over a year on the day of the honey- and-lemon tea. They had already decided that when Ruby reached the fifth grade, she would transfer to public school. Sophie couldn’t risk drawing attention to the fact that she lived with Ruby and her mother, and they couldn’t put the burden of that lie on a child.  When the time came, Ruby made the transition easily. Her new teacher read a chapter or two every morning from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Lots of nonwhite children attended the public school. Ruby made a few good friends. But while public school made her happy, it was also the reason they lost her.
            
    Sitting in her kitchen, cupping the Greatest Mom mug to keep her fingers warm, Sophie smiled as her thoughts drifted to the first time she met Lois and her daughter. That story had become part of the family mythology and was repeated often. It took Sophie a long time to consider it as funny as Lois and Ruby did. It had occurred the first day of school in 1973, or was it ’74? She never could remember exactly. Sophie’s aunt, who’d been a school teacher too, had died that summer and left her