Part 3 — Letters to Lubbock
“How do you know my sister?” Jason said, but he said it to Tara, not to the woman in the doorway. Tara had gone the color of the tablecloth. She stared at the fork on the floor as though it might speak up for her. The woman held up the envelope and turned it slowly so that we could all see the handwriting, which I knew from twenty years of birthday cards. “Tell them, Tara,” she said. “Or I will.”
Tara told it in a voice I could barely hear. Back in June, Rick had asked her for a favor. His wife, Lorraine, kept calling, and he did not want her to know where he was. For a hundred dollars a trip, Tara drove to Lubbock once a month with an envelope of cash, four hundred dollars each time, and a story: that Rick was working a pipeline job in North Dakota and sending money through a friend. She had stood on that porch in July, in August, and in September, wearing sunglasses.
“She sat on my porch in August, Wanda,” Lorraine said to me, “and I gave her a glass of iced tea. She told me she was a friend from the oil company. I believed her because I wanted to.” She turned the envelope over. Inside was a note in the handwriting of Tara: Rick is fine. He misses the kids. The girl behind her, sixteen and thin, read it over the arm of her mother and made a small sound.
For a moment nobody breathed. I looked at my daughter, whom I had carried for nine months and held through a lost apartment, and I did not feel rage. I felt a deep tiredness, the kind that comes from realizing how far someone has drifted from the shore. I said, “Tara, sit down. You are going to eat your dinner, and then we are going to talk.” She sat. Her shoulders shook.
Then I turned to the man at the head of my table, in the chair my husband built. “Richard,” I said. “You have no lease. You paid in cash to my son, not to me, and I never agreed to a thing. I am giving you notice to leave this house tonight. Your boots are on my side of the bed, and your bags are in my closet, and you have until the pie is cut.” I said it the way I used to tell a trucker his order was up.
Rick tried one last time, and Lorraine did not let him. She took a folded paper out of her purse and laid it beside the gravy boat. It was the name and number of a lawyer in Lubbock who handled child support, and an application for an order that would be paid straight out of his paycheck, with no one in the middle. “You can sign that tonight,” she said, “or I will be at your job on Monday. Your children have been eating beans, Richard.”
Jason finally found his voice. He stood up, red to the ears, and said the money had gone to the payments on his truck, not to groceries. It was the first honest thing he had said to me in months. I told him he would repay the three thousand six hundred dollars of rent to Lorraine, a little at a time, out of his own wages, and that he would hand it to her himself. He nodded. He did not argue, and I was proud of him for that, in a sad way.
Rick left an hour later with a duffel bag and his hat in his hand. He did not say goodbye to anyone. Lorraine stayed. I set two more places at the table, because there were still two children standing by the door with their coats on. The girl sat down first. Her brother sat down after her, and the pecan pie went around, and nobody talked about anything but pie for ten whole minutes.
That night Jason and Tara carried my bed out of the sewing room and back into the room where my husband and I slept for forty-four years. It took them forty minutes, and I stood in the doorway directing, as I had directed a thousand tables. They stripped the sheets Rick had used and put on my own. Tara hung my church dress in the closet. When she turned around, I opened my arms, and she walked into them.
A house is not made of the rooms we own, but of the people who remember whose hands built it.
We had a long talk at the kitchen table, the three of us, over cold coffee. They could stay, I said, but this time it would be honest. Each of them would pay two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and help with the house, and speak to me as the person who owned it. Tara would find work by January. Jason would call Lorraine on the first of every month. They agreed to all of it, and when I looked at their faces, I believed them.
I kept the hook on the back of the sewing room door. In December I hung a wreath on it, a small one, red ribbon and pine. Lorraine sent a Christmas card with a picture of her two kids in new shoes. I put it on the refrigerator beside the photograph of my husband, standing on the roof of the house in 1979 with a hammer in his hand. At night I slept in my own bed, in my own room, and the wind sounded just like it always had.