Wayne lunged for the sealed envelope, but Hal caught his arm before he reached me. “Let her read it,” Hal said, very quietly. The deck of the lake house had gone absolutely silent. A boat horn sounded somewhere out on Pickwick, small and far away. I held the envelope in both hands. It was thick, with the name of my husband on the front in the square printing of my father, and I felt something cold slide down the back of my neck.
I opened it with my thumb. Inside was a letter, a single sheet, and a savings bond with a face value of two thousand dollars. I read the letter aloud, because I thought Wayne deserved to hear it in the open air, and because I did not trust myself to keep it to myself. “Wayne. I know you drove Pam to my house that Sunday in March, while Lydia was at church. I know you stood in the hall while she asked me to sign over the house and the land. I said no. I forgive you for standing there.”
My voice caught, and I had to start the next line again. “I do not forgive you for letting Lydia carry it alone, all these years, not knowing. Tell her yourself. If you do, the bond in this envelope is yours, with my blessing. If you do not, my lawyer has a copy of this letter, and he will tell her for you.” Nobody on that deck moved. Wayne looked as though he were standing on the edge of a roof.
“I did not know what she was going to ask,” he said finally, hoarse. “She told me Daddy wanted to see us. I drove her out there. When I heard what the papers were, I should have turned around. But Pam said it was only to keep the house in the family, and your father seemed so tired.” He swallowed. “And then he said no, and she was so angry, and I was ashamed. I have been ashamed for five years. I did not know how to say it.”
I stood a moment with my eyes closed. It was strange. The anger that I had expected arrived in me as a kind of calm. The man in front of me was not a villain. He was a weak, frightened man who had loved a sister more than the truth, and who had watched his father-in-law refuse to be robbed and then watched his wife grieve in silence. I thought of my father and his green footlocker at the foot of the bed.
Pam began to speak, rapid and thin, and Hal turned to her with a face I had never seen on him. “Pam, stop,” he said. “For once in your life, stop.” He picked up the glass top from the floor and set it aside, then lifted the letters of my mother out of the footlocker, and the Purple Heart in its small case, and handed them to me one at a time, as gently as if they were eggs. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you are driving this to the house of Lydia, and you are going to say it to her face.”
She did, the next afternoon, in a gray dress, with her hands knotted together. She said she was ashamed, that she had gone to my father because she was afraid of losing the house of her childhood, and that she had hoped he would be too old to refuse. She said she had been wrong. When she was done I asked her one thing. “Pam, did you sign anything in my name?” She shook her head. “No. Daddy would not let me.” It was the first time I believed her entirely.
On Monday I took the letter to the lawyer of my father, Mr. Oliver, who had waited five years with his file. The deed to the house and the forty acres was in my name, recorded the previous spring, exactly as my father had arranged. Nothing Pam had asked him to sign had ever been signed, and so there was nothing to undo. Mr. Oliver told me gently that the law had nothing to say about an attempt that failed. The only court that mattered, he said, was the court of the family.
Wayne did not wait for me to ask him to apologize. That night, in our kitchen, he told me the whole story again, slowly, with the lights low, and he did not leave anything out. I listened. When he was finished I said, “Thank you for telling me yourself.” He wept, and I put my hand on his, and we sat there until the coffee went cold. The next week he took the savings bond to the animal shelter on Cloverdale Road and gave it in memory of my father.
A father who loves his daughter will leave her not only his things but the truth, hidden where only love will look.
The footlocker stands at the foot of our bed now, with its green paint and its stenciled name. We keep it unlocked. On the first Saturday of every month Wayne and I take out one of the letters of my mother and read it aloud on the porch. They are plain things, about the weather in 1952 and a dress she was sewing and a boy in a uniform she had not yet met. Wayne reads them better than I do. His voice is steady now.
On my birthday, Pam sent a card. There was a picture of the lake on the front, and inside, in her careful hand, she had written only: Thank you for not hating me. I propped it on the dresser next to the Purple Heart. I did not answer right away. But I did, in the end, with a small note and a jar of my peach jam, which is the kind of answer our family has always known how to give.