The phone rang at five in the morning, Hawaii time, which was eight in the morning for me, sitting at my kitchen table in Sacramento with a cold cup of tea and the printout from the resort. I had not moved from that chair since the night before. The number on the screen was an island number I did not know. I picked up on the fourth ring and said hello in a voice that I hoped sounded braver than I felt. A woman answered, soft and a little hoarse, with an accent from somewhere in the Midwest. “Mrs. Arredondo?” she said. “My name is Odessa Pruitt. I think we should talk.”
I asked her, as politely as I could manage, why she had been signing my name. Odessa did not flinch. She said she had been expecting the call for two days, ever since the clerk looked at her strangely. She said she was seventy nine years old and had stayed in unit 306 every April for twenty two years, and she had never once done anything dishonest in her life, except this. “I want you to hear the whole story,” she said. “Then you can decide whether to call the police. I will not blame you either way.”
She told me that her husband Walter had served with my husband Ray in the Army, in a supply company in Germany, in 1969. In a firefight that Ray never spoke of, Walter had pulled Ray out from under a burning truck and carried him a quarter mile. Walter was awarded nothing. He came home, worked for the railroad for thirty years, and died in 2001 of a heart attack, with a widow, a mortgage, and no savings. A month after the funeral, an envelope arrived in the mail. It held a letter from Ray and a key card for a Maui resort unit.
“He wrote, Odessa, your husband gave me forty more years, and I never could repay it,” she said. “He wrote, I cannot give you Walter back. But I can give you one week every April of your life, in a place where you can sit on a balcony and remember him. I bought unit 306 with my own savings, and I put it in my wife name so no one at home would ask questions. Please do not tell Helen. She would only worry about the money.” I put my hand on my chest. Helen was me. And Ray had been right. I would have worried about the money.
The kindest gifts are often the ones given in secret, because the giver wants nothing back but the quiet joy of knowing.
I asked her about the signature, the ID, the word wife. Odessa blushed so hard I could hear it. She said Ray had mailed her a photocopy of my driver license in 2002, with a note saying the resort needed to see an owner on file, and that I had given my permission. She did not know it was a lie until the clerk told her. Ray must have intended to tell me, and then did not, because he had been so shy about his own generosity. In twenty two years, no one at the desk had ever questioned a polite elderly woman with a copy of my card.
The next question I had to ask was the hardest. I asked who had been paying the fee of two thousand dollars every year for unit 306. The answer was in my husband handwriting, in the ledger that I had found two days earlier and not understood. A single line, repeated every January for twenty years. Maui second week. Ray had been taking it out of the money he made fixing neighbor lawn mowers in the garage on Saturdays. I had always thought it was for cigars. Ray had not smoked a cigar in his life.
I could not stop my tears. They were happy ones, mostly. I sat at that table and thought of the man I had been married to for forty seven years, the one who could not remember my birthday without a sticky note, but could remember a debt to a dead friend for the length of a lifetime. I thought of the nights he had stayed up with the radio, of the long Aprils when he said he was visiting his brother in Fresno. I had been so proud of him for being dependable. I had never known he was heroic.
Odessa was crying too by then. She said she would leave Maui that very day and never return, if that was what I wanted. I told her no. I told her to stay in 306 through the end of the week and enjoy the balcony. I said I would be on the next flight. I did not have to think about it. I asked her to wait for me in the lobby of the resort, at ten in the morning, and not to eat breakfast alone. She said she would not eat a bite until I arrived.
When I walked into that lobby six hours of flying and one very long layover later, I saw a small woman in a lavender cardigan sitting on a rattan bench, holding a photograph in both hands. She stood up when she saw me. We looked at each other for a moment, two old women who had never met, and then she opened her arms. I walked into them. She smelled of lilacs and sea air. Neither of us said a word for a long time. A porter with a luggage cart looked away politely.
We spent the week together on the balcony of unit 306. We drank iced tea and watched the whales out past the reef, and Odessa told me stories of Ray as a young man that I had never heard. The way he had danced on a table in Heidelberg. The way he had written to her husband every Christmas, until the last one. I told her about the day Ray and I met, at a church picnic in 1971, when he spilled potato salad on my shoes and apologized for twenty minutes.
My son and Lindsey came out on the Friday flight. They had been the ones who contacted the resort, out of worry, and they stood on the lanai with their heads bowed. I hugged them both. Then I handed Lindsey the ledger and told her that our family had a great deal to be proud of. We changed the deed that afternoon so that unit 306 belongs to Odessa Pruitt, free and clear, in her own name. Ray would have wanted it. Walter, too.