A Member of the Family

The argument starts before John Avery Whittaker can even say hello. His daughter Jana has driven back to Odyssey to collect her son Monty at the end of a week's stay, and she arrives certain that her father has turned the boy against her. Monty has told her that Grandpa loves him more than she does, and he wants to stay. Whit calls it kid talk, but Jana wants answers, so he takes her into the den and tells her the whole story: angry about having to earn his spending money, Monty talked a clerk at Whit's store into opening the cash register and helped himself. Whit had not let that pass. He spanked the boy, and he says so plainly. Jana is horrified. She has always hated that kind of punishment, and when Whit suggests that whatever she has been doing at home has not been working, the conversation collapses. Monty may stay for his party, she says, but she will spend the night in a hotel downtown. This house is her father's home, not hers. Not anymore.

Later, drying dishes in the kitchen, Whit's friend Tom Riley asks whether it has always been like this between the two of them. Whit admits the truth. He does not understand his daughter, he cannot predict her, and he senses a deep anger in her aimed straight at him. Tom reminds Whit that God has given him a gift for helping people see their troubles clearly, and that all he has to do is take some of that good advice for himself. Whit says that where his daughter is concerned, he is fresh out of ideas.

Morning brings another quarrel, and then a scare: Monty's suitcases are still upstairs, but Monty is gone. At the sheriff's office, Fred greets them with news before they can report anything. A deputy on patrol heard glass breaking near Whit's store and caught a boy climbing in through the back window. Whit is so relieved that he refuses to press charges of the kind Fred means.

Back home, Jana asks Monty why. He heard the fighting, he says. His parents used to fight, and then his dad moved out, and now he thinks he will lose his grandfather too. Whit steps in and tells his grandson the truth as he sees it. Monty's mother loves him more than anyone in the world, the kind of love that puts someone else's best interests ahead of your own. She works hard so he can have what he needs. She did not send his father away, and nobody was sadder than she was when he left.

The apology Monty owes his mother opens a door for Whit and Jana. Whit tells her something he has been awake all night thinking about. When her brother died in the war, the family grieved in separate directions. She threw herself into protests at fourteen. Her mother buried herself in volunteer work. Whit moved the family to Odyssey to put distance between the war and his younger son, who was only a few years from draft age, and he spent every hour he could with that boy. Jana got lost in it. He never meant it, and he has never found a way to close the gap it left.

Jana thought her father simply did not like girls. Neither of them wants the tension that has grown up between them, so they agree to try again, slowly, as two people who happen to be related and would like to be friends. Jana sets one condition: a real hug, something Whit has not given her since her brother died. Whit realizes he thought he lost one child and very nearly lost two.

Monty finds them making up and asks whether he can spend his vacation with Grandpa. His mother points out that plate glass is expensive, and so is the damage inside the store. At five dollars a lawn, paying it off could take weeks, with restriction filling the hours in between. Whit calls it a fair settlement. Then Jana mentions vacation time of her own, and a trip to Odyssey with both her children, if they are still invited. The best guest house in town is exclusive, Whit tells her. You have to know somebody to get a reservation. She knows him. That counts.