Some Sweet Day by Bryan Woolley

not there!” Belinda said. “You’re telling a story!”
    â€œDoggone!” I said. “I thought sure that was it.”
    Joe George got up and walked around the other side of the house, and pretty soon he came running and yelling, “It’s coming! It’s coming from the other way! Hurry, Belinda, or you’ll miss it!”
    And Belinda took off again. We kept up this game until Belinda got tuckered out and looked like she was about to cry. “No fair, Gate!” she said. “You keep on fooling me!”
    Her brown eyes looked so big and hurt that I felt kind of ashamed of myself, so I held her in my lap and played with the curls that were sticking out from under her red knit cap, and pretty soon she grinned at me, and everything was all right again.
    Virgie came out and told us to come in and eat, and we missed the ambulance. We were halfway through our soup when Gran opened the door.
    â€œYoo-hoo!” she hollered. “Anybody home?”
    We jumped up and ran outside, and there was the ambulance already pulled up outside the front gate, and two men in white coats rolling out the stretcher with Mother on it. No siren, no lights, no nothing. Virgie held us back on the porch while Gran went out and took a little bundle of blanket from one of the men. She carried it to the house, and we all crowded around, saying, “Let me see! Let me see!”
    â€œNo, no,” Gran said. “Stay back until they get your mother in.”
    Mother’s hair looked bright red against the sheet of the stretcher. She smiled at us when they carried her up the steps, but she looked tired and pale, and she didn’t say anything. We waited until the men came back out with the stretcher, and Gran came to the door and said, “You can come in now, but don’t make any noise. The baby’s asleep.”
    We tiptoed, but Gran still said, “Shh!” Mother had been laid in Gran’s bed, and the little bundle of blanket was in the crook of her arm. She reached over and folded some of the blanket back and showed us the little red baby.
    â€œOoooo! Little!” Rick said, reaching toward it.
    â€œNo, no! Don’t touch,” Gran whispered. “You’ll wake her up.”
    â€œShe does look like a cherry, doesn’t she?” Belinda whispered to me.
    Mother stretched her arm toward us, and we went up one by one and hugged her and kissed her.
    â€œMy babies!” she whispered. “You’re all my babies!”
    Later, Virgie handed Mother an envelope. “Here’s something that’ll make you feel better,” she said. “A letter from Will.”
    Mother tore open the envelope. There was just one sheet of paper inside. She read it quickly and dropped her arm onto the bed and looked at Gran, even tireder than before.
    â€œWill’s been hurt,” she said.
    My father and several others had been crossing a bridge across a rocky ravine, and somebody blew up the bridge with a hand grenade. One soldier was killed, and my father and the others fell to the bottom of the ravine. I never knew where it happened, except that it wasn’t overseas. My mother got a letter from him occasionally while he was in the hospital, but she never read them aloud to us as she did before the accident. And she never smiled when she read them to herself. She read them once, then put them into their envelopes and put them away in her cedar chest.
    My mother sent my father some money that my grandmother gave her, and he sent us some presents. Rick got a little donkey carved out of cedar, and Belinda got an Indian doll wrapped in a little red blanket. I got a leather case with some crayons and a comb and nail file in it. “Souvenir of Hot Springs, Ark.” was printed on all of them. My father sent my mother a little leather coin purse which she said he made in the hospital.
    My father had sent my mother two photographs of himself before the accident. In