Part 3 — The Hiding Place
Lucys small voice kept going on the recording, bright and unafraid, the way children talk when they think the grown-ups are only playing.
“Daddy said do not tell Grandma Roz where he hid the toolbox and the truck. It is a secret. It is in Uncle Daryls barn.”
A man at the end of the table cleared his throat. Harold, Bevs husband, said it plainly. “Uncle Daryl lives six miles up Salt Creek Road. I will drive out there right now.”
Colt did not argue. He stood in the middle of my backyard with his beer going warm and said that Jenna had begged him to hide Hanks things so she would not be able to sell them.
Jenna sat in the grass with both hands over her face.
“I did say that,” she whispered. “Mama, I did. I knew I would take them again.”
Nobody moved. Thirty people at a picnic, and all of them still.
My daughter had told her husband the truth in a good hour, and he had spent the bad hours pretending it was my fault.
Harold came back in forty minutes with the toolbox in the bed of his own truck, and Hanks truck behind him with Daryl at the wheel. Every wrench was in its place.
I knelt beside Jenna in the grass. I am a hospice nurse, and I have sat beside a great many people on the worst night of their lives, and I know that the only thing to say is the next true thing.
“There is a program in Casper that starts Monday morning. I called them in March. I have held a bed on the list for three months.”
She looked at me as if I had handed her water in a desert.
The pharmacy printout, I explained to the family, was never meant to shame anyone. It was meant to give the doctors an honest picture, and they would see it Monday along with her.
Colt asked in a hoarse voice what he was supposed to do. I told him to stop buying whatever she asked for, to stop telling the children to keep secrets, and to go with her. Spouses are allowed in the family program on Thursday nights.
He put a hundred and forty dollars on the picnic table, and then another thousand from his wallet. It was the money from the jar, with interest he had worked out in his head.
On Monday I drove Jenna myself. She held a paper bag with a toothbrush in it. In the lobby she turned and hugged me so hard I felt it in my back for a week.
When I got home I stood in the garage in front of the penciled marks on the wall.
Lucy had grown another half inch. I took Hanks pencil from the toolbox and made the mark, and wrote the date beside it.
“Little Lucy is past the doorknob,” I told the empty garage. “Just like you said.”