“Done wrong?” I says. “Done wrong to come home? Don’t them words kind of fight each other in the sentence? Of course you didn’t do wrong. Why,” says I, “Lisbeth, this is Friendship Village’s Home-coming year. It’s Home-coming week next month, you know.”
She looked at me wistful there in the dark beside the child’s bed. “Oh, not for me,” she says. “This house is my home—but this town ain’t any more. It don’t want me.”
“It don’t want me,” I says over to myself, going home. And I looked along at the nice, neat little houses, with the front doors standing open to the spring night, and dishes clattering musical here and there in kitchens, getting washed up, and lights up-stairs where children were being put to bed. And I thought, “Never tell me that this little town don’t want everybody that belongs to it to live in it. The town is true. It’s folks that’s false.” I says that over: “The town is true. It’s folks that’s false. How you going to make them know it?”
When it come my turn to have the Homecoming committee meet to my house, things had begun to get exciting. Acceptances had commenced coming in. I’d emptied out my photograph basket, and we had ’em all in it. It was real fun and heart-warming to read ’em. Miss Sykes was presiding—that woman’ll be one of them that comes back from the grave to do table-rapping. She does so love to call anything to order.
“Judge Eustis Bangs is coming,” says Mis’ Sykes, impressive, looking over the envelopes. “They say his wife don’t think anything in the world of having company in to a meal every week or so.”
“ ‘Used-to’ Bangs coming!” cries Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss. “He set behind me in school. Land, I ain’t seen him since graduating exercises when he dipped my braid in the inkwell.”
“And Sarah Arthur,” Mis’ Sykes went on. “She’s lady bookkeeper in a big department store in the city, and in with all them four hundred.”
“I always wonder,” says Mis’ Holcomb, looking up and frowning meditative, “four hundred what? Do they mean folks, or millionaires, or what do they mean by that?”
“Oh, why millionaires, of course,” says Mis’ Sykes. “It don’t refer to folks. Look-a-here,” she says next. “Admiral and Mrs. Homer is coming. Why, you know he was only bare born here—he went away before he was three months old. And she’s never been here. But they’re coming now. Ladies! A admiral!”