Elsie Waits for the Door

Elsie wanted her grandad to come home, and she wanted it now.

He had gone away to help with the apple picking. He had been gone for six sleeps. Elsie had counted them on her fingers, and then on her toes.

Elsie lived in a treehouse with a platform strung between three sturdy branches. Grandad's chair stood up there. It was the kind of chair that rocked itself gently whenever someone sat in it that day. Nobody thought this was strange. It was just a chair.

Today the chair was not rocking at all.

"Grandad hasn't sat in you," said Elsie. "Nobody has."

She sat in it herself, to make it rock. It did not. She sat in it harder. It creaked once, and that was all.

So Elsie tried something else. She went down the ladder and found a small green seed in the shed. She planted it in a pot by the treehouse door.

"When you grow," she told the seed, "Grandad will be back."

She checked it in the morning. Nothing. She checked it at lunch. Nothing. She checked it at bedtime, with the torch. Still nothing, only brown soil.

Elsie put her chin on the pot. "I miss him," she said. "I miss him all the way down to my toes."

Then she noticed something. Her toes were cold, and the chair was not.

Elsie climbed up and put her hand on the seat. It was warm. Somebody had been sitting there. Somebody had just got up.

The chair began to rock. Creak, creak, creak.

"Boo!" said a voice from behind the big branch.

Elsie jumped. Then she shrieked. Then she ran.

It was Grandad, with a basket of apples and leaves in his hair. The door of the treehouse only opened from the outside, he said, and he had been waiting there ever so quietly, hoping she would come.

"Six sleeps," said Elsie into his coat.

"Six sleeps," said Grandad.

The chair rocked and rocked, and Elsie rocked with it, and an apple rolled across the boards, bump, bump, bump, and stopped against her toe.