Always Home

On a hot summer day, Bridget Perkins comes to Whit's End with her mother, Carla, and her little brother, Wyatt, expecting nothing more than milkshakes. Instead, Whit announces he has a special Imagination Station adventure that will let the kids spend time with their father, who has been deployed overseas with the military. Bridget is skeptical, but she and Wyatt step through an unfamiliar door and find themselves in what looks like an ordinary supply closet, where their dad is waiting. Bridget assumes he is just a lifelike program, even when he calls her by her childhood nickname, Bubblegum, and correctly explains that it comes from the gum she used to fall asleep chewing that ended up stuck in her hair. Only when Connie wanders in looking for the vacuum does the truth come out: this really is the supply closet, and their dad, Ronald, is really home. His arrival was a surprise the whole family helped plan, kept secret in case his leave fell through like it did the year before.

The catch is that Dad has only one week before he must return to duty. Wyatt, ever the planner, immediately starts calculating how to squeeze the most out of every hour, budgeting the family down to two hours of sleep a night. But Bridget abruptly announces she has been called into work and leaves, disappointing everyone. The next morning, Wyatt unveils his master plan: since Dad has missed so many holidays, they will celebrate all of them in one week, from an eight a.m. Thanksgiving dinner to Christmas carols, Valentine's Day, and a Presidents' Day reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware. Bridget balks, insisting the rest of her life does not stop just because Dad is home.

The family presses on anyway, counting down to a rain-soaked backyard New Year's celebration featuring a ceremonial honeydew melon lowered on a fishing line. Bridget storms inside, soaked and fed up, and her dad follows, guessing that she is still angry at him for joining the Reserves instead of retiring. But Bridget surprises him. She reveals that she once asked to write her school report on a great American hero about him, and tells him, "I'm not mad at you. I want to be you." Still, she will not say what is really bothering her.

Meanwhile, Wyatt stages his own Alaskan Iditarod by harnessing his elderly turtle, Flash, to a tiny sleigh. When Flash refuses to budge even for lettuce, a trip to the vet brings sad news: Flash is dying of an infection, and treatment would be expensive and probably useless. To everyone's astonishment, Bridget is the one who gets upset, demanding to know why nobody will even try to save him, then walking out on the family's plans again.

She ends up in a booth at Whit's End, where Whit gently draws out the truth. Bridget admits Flash was the worst pet ever, so motionless that "it was like having a pet stick," yet for seven years he was always there. Whit helps her see the connection to her own life: moving constantly as a military kid, she stopped making friends because she always had to leave them, and now she is simply tired of saying goodbye. Bridget confesses that she faked the text calling her in to work, because being with her dad only reminds her that another goodbye is coming, and it feels unfair that other kids get eighteen years with their fathers while she gets a week. Whit understands more than she knows. All day he has been quietly grieving, and he tells her about his best friend, Tom Riley, who used to meet him in that very booth before dawn to talk and pray, and whose birthday is today, years after his death. Goodbyes will always hurt, Whit says, but it helps to seek comfort from God and to know you made the most of the time you had. He reminds her that when Jesus faced death, he chose to spend his last night at dinner with his best friends.

Bridget hurries home to find that Flash has died, and the family has waited so she can join the funeral. Dad's eulogy for Flash Hieronymus Perkins wobbles between silly and sweet, ending with the one thing he envies about turtles: "they're always home." Bridget teases him for the corny line, then declares it National Spontaneous Activity Day and proposes popcorn and a movie, choosing at last to soak up every moment of the week they have. Back at Whit's End, as Connie locks up, she remembers that it is Tom's birthday and asks Whit if he is okay. Rather than heading home, Whit takes his own advice and asks Connie to sit in the old booth with him and simply talk for a while.