Eva Marie Everson
There were four of them.
Two girls and two boys.
They were teenagers, my father told my mother over the phone, and he didn’t want the girls to have a record that would follow them into adulthood. It was okay, he said—not okay, but not as bad—if the boys had a record. They would spend the night in the barracks at the patrol station or in a jail cell.
They were runaways.
Two young men and two young women in the mid-1960s. The boys wore crew cuts and dressed respectably. Slim pants and loafers and casual shirts. The girls wore pencil skirts and short-sleeved, button-up blouses and bobby socks and oxfords. They wore their hair flipped on their shoulders and they were pretty.
The boys were Ken-doll handsome.
And they were all four runaways.
Only a day or so earlier, the BOLO had gone out across the state to law enforcement agencies. The parents were frantic. What had their children been thinking when they took off like they did. Where did they think they were going?
My father spotted the car heading toward Savannah—or maybe Augusta—and pulled them over. I wonder now what must have gone through their minds. Were they afraid? Relieved? Where had their final destination been and what plans could they have possibly had?
The boys were seventeen. The girls sixteen.
Daddy called Mother late that afternoon. “Let the girls stay with us,” he suggested. “Their parents will be here tomorrow morning to get them. Too late now for them to drive here.”
I don’t know where they lived. I don’t even remember their names. But I can see them plainly as Daddy pulled into the driveway of our house where I peered through the wide living room window with all the wonder of a little girl under the age of ten. I watched as they gathered their things from Daddy’s State-issued car. I watched as my mother went out to help them. I saw them say goodbye to the boys.
At least I think I did. I seem to remember it so well now, yet I cannot be sure.
But I am certain of the girls crying in my bedroom. I am as sure of the fear and uncertainty they felt as I am of the way they sat on my bed with their feet tucked up under them. Mother had fed them a good supper, of course. They had taken showers. And now, all there was to do was wait for tomorrow.
I brought them my dolls. I thought perhaps if they played with Barbie and Midge, with Skipper and Francie, with Ken and Alan—then perhaps they would feel better. I toppled all their clothes into the middle of my bed—the bed where they would sleep that night—and, together, the three of us undressed them and redressed them. For the beach. For school. For a party. We did this for quite a while.
They asked me a lot of questions about myself. I asked them no questions about themselves. Or maybe I did. To be honest, it would be like me to ask mounds of questions, even then.
The following morning my mother made breakfast. She always made breakfast—eggs and toast and bacon and grits. Or, perhaps, we had pancakes. She made delicious pancakes. Afterward, the girls—I don’t remember their names—gathered their meager possessions, said goodbye, and left with my father to join their boyfriends at the patrol station, which housed my father’s office. There, they would wait for their parents to come get them. To take them home to their own bedrooms and to their consequences.
Because they were runaways. And they were teenagers.
And, in the end, the girls were left without a record.
Because of my father’s insight and my mother’s hospitality.
But I don’t even remember their names.