Part 3 — Half of Everything
Mr. Pruett stood at the end of the table with his hat in both hands, a tall, stooped man with a gentle face, and he looked at Wendell for a long time without any anger at all. “I did not come to make trouble on a holiday,” he said. “I lost my wife two years ago, and I know what it is to have something taken that cannot be gotten back. I came because the county clerk told me I could not register your trailer, Bonnie. The name on the title was not the name of the woman who sold it to me.”
Crystal laughed again, that high ugly sound, and pointed across the potatoes. “Go on, Wendell,” she said. “Tell her what you did with yours.” My husband stared at his plate. The man I had married forty-four years before, who knew the name of every fish in the lake, suddenly looked small. “I put it in a machine,” he said. “At the casino outside Hardin. Three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, by Christmas. Some of it I tried to win back. The rest went on the credit card.”
I had long suspected something. A wife of forty-four years can feel when her husband is carrying a second set of keys. But I did not know it was this. He told me, in front of his sister and her husband and Mr. Pruett, that it had been going on for years in small amounts, that he had been ashamed, and that when I discovered the trailer gone he had begged me to leave it alone because he knew exactly where the money had gone.
Crystal had spent hers on the new patio set, a dental bridge, and the back rent on a storage unit. Only two thousand one hundred dollars remained. Her husband, red to the ears, said he had no idea. I believed him, because his face did not have the look of a man who had. He turned to his wife and asked her very quietly to go and get her checkbook, and she did, for once without a word.
I thought about what I wanted for a long time, sitting in the chair of my sister-in-law with my hands folded. The trailer was mine. The title said so. A sale by someone who is not the owner is no sale at all, so the right belonged to me, and the loss belonged to Mr. Pruett. He had paid six thousand five hundred dollars to a woman who lied to him. I would not allow that kind man to carry the price of my family.
So I set the terms at the table, between the ham and the rolls. Mr. Pruett would be refunded every dollar within fourteen days. Crystal would give back the two thousand one hundred dollars that remained, and return the patio set to the store for whatever they would give her. Wendell would sell his bass boat, the one he loved best, to cover the rest. If the full amount was not in the hands of Mr. Pruett by then, I would write a letter to the county attorney that very night.
Forging a signature is a felony in Montana, and a lawyer friend of mine had said so more than once. I did not want to see the sister of my husband, or my husband himself, in court. I wanted what was fair. Mr. Pruett listened and nodded, and said that he would accept those terms, and that he had never intended to take a thing from anyone. He asked only that Crystal write him an honest letter. She wrote it the next day, four pages long, and cried through the whole third one.
The money was in his hands in eleven days. The patio set went back with its tags still on. The boat sold to a young man from Laurel who promised to take good care of it, and Wendell stood in the driveway watching it go behind the truck until it was out of sight. Then he came inside and sat at the kitchen table across from me and said, “I do not know how to ask you to stay.”
I told him how it would be. A counselor, who helps people with the machine, every week. A bank account in my name alone for the household, and one that we both could see. The title would go into a vault at the bank, and the key would be mine. I told him I was not leaving, because I had not stopped loving him, but that love was no longer going to be a place where things could hide. He held my hands and nodded, and for once there was nothing in his face to guess at.
Out at the curb, all afternoon on Easter, stood my trailer. Mr. Pruett had towed it over behind his old truck, teal stripe and all, and he had replaced the water pump and mended the screen on the door before he ever knocked. The gray tin he had carried to the table held more than papers. Under the bill of sale was a spare key, an old fishing photograph that someone had left wedged in the dinette, and a note in his shaky hand: I kept this safe for the owner.
What is truly ours cannot be taken for long, because honest people will always find their way back to return it.
In June the leaves along the lake were thick and green. I parked the trailer in our usual spot beneath the cottonwoods. Beside it, on the next lot, sat Mr. Pruett in a folding chair with a thermos, since I had insisted he come for the first week. The grandkids fished off the back bumper, shrieking over every bite. Wendell, thinner and quieter, cleaned the catch with steady hands.
At sunset I sat on the step with a mug of coffee and watched the water turn the color of the stripe along the side of the trailer. Mr. Pruett lifted his cup toward me across the grass. I lifted mine back. A forty-four year marriage and a sixteen-foot trailer, I thought, had both come home a little scratched, and a little wiser, and a great deal more honest than when they left.