Part 3 — Becky Calls Home
Lyle spoke slowly, with both hands wrapped around his cup. “Your sister was not hurt, Rhonda,” he said. “She was sixteen, scared, and expecting a baby. She asked your Aunt Lorna for help. Lorna drove her to Duluth that night, to a home for young mothers run by her church.”
“Your mother, God rest her, had told Becky that if she ever got in trouble, she was no daughter of hers. Becky believed it. She was too afraid to ask for forgiveness.”
“I found the shoe in the ditch the next morning, the one Lorna left behind. I made a bad choice. I wrote it up as a missing teenager and kept my mouth shut because Lorna begged me. I have regretted it every October since.”
Lorna passed in 2019, he said, and her last wish was that someone tell me. He had not had the courage until tonight. Becky lived in Duluth, married to a dentist named Neil, with three kids. She was forty-seven years old.
I held out my hand. “Do you have a number?” Lyle slid a card from his wallet, with a phone number in Lorna shaky writing. I dialed it from the counter at 9:40 p.m., the exact minute my sister left the football game thirty-two years ago.
A woman answered. “Hello?” she said. I could not speak. “Rhonnie?” she whispered.
Love sometimes sends a sixteen-year-old away to keep her safe, and then it takes thirty years to bring her home.
The Muncie police chief came to the diner the next morning. The state police reclassified the case as a found person and closed the file. The department issued a public correction and a written apology to our family. Too much time had passed for any charges, but Lyle gave a full statement and apologized to me face to face.
Becky drove down that weekend with Neil. She walked in through the front door of the Hoosier Grill, and we stood looking at each other across the whole diner. Then we both started laughing and crying, and neither of us could stop.
She had kept her baby. Her oldest daughter, Maya, was thirty-one, with Becky chin and Mama eyes. Maya hugged me and said, “Aunt Rhonda, I have heard about you my entire life.”
I took the faded poster down from the window. In its place I hung a photograph of the two of us, side by side in Booth 4, splitting a chocolate shake with two straws.
