Keisha drew the contract out of the envelope with both hands and read the first page standing up. “Five million, seven hundred thousand dollars,” she said. She turned her head toward the refrigerator, where the door was open a crack and the jar of chow chow with the green label sat in the light. “Miss Edwina, I have eaten this on my black eyed peas every New Year for six years. I told everybody at church it was the best in Texas.” Her voice dropped. “And I made you sleep on a pull out couch because the smell of vinegar got into my curtains.” Reggie sat with the sheet of costs in front of him, and the pen, and nothing to say.
I let her finish. Then I turned to my son and laid my hand on the cold steel of the razor. “Reggie,” I said, “your father carried that razor in his back pocket for forty three years. He shaved the face of every deacon in Bowie County with it. He sold that shop to Marcus on a handshake and a note, and he told me it was my groceries for the rest of my life.” I took out the screenshots. “Twenty six payments. Twenty eight thousand, six hundred dollars. I have not seen a dime. And you told me, to my face, in this kitchen, that Marcus had skipped town.”
Reggie finally looked up, and I saw that his eyes were wet. He is fifty one, a big, slope shouldered man who sells tires, and he has the hands of Otis and none of the calm. “Mama, I was going to tell you,” he said. “I was always about to.” He said that the tire store had lost its lease two years ago. He said he had borrowed against the house to keep the doors open, and that when the first check from Marcus came, he put it toward the payment, just that once, just to hold on. “Then the next month the bank called again. And I thought, it is only one more month. And Daddy would have wanted the family to stay in the house.”
A straight razor and a white envelope lay on a kitchen table in Texarkana and gave one barber widow the Sunday afternoon to bring her son back to the barbershop.
“Your father would have wanted no such thing,” I said. “He would have wanted you to knock on his door, and say, Daddy, I am in trouble. And he would have given you his last dollar and a haircut.” Keisha made a small sound. She had put down the contract and was holding the edge of the table. “Reggie,” she said. “The mortgage payments. You told me the extra money was overtime. You told me the Silverado was a trade in.” She looked at me, and her face crumpled. “Miss Edwina, I have been living in a house that you have been paying for. I did not know. I swear before God I did not know.”
I believed her. I have known Keisha since the day she walked into our church in a yellow dress and sat in the wrong pew. She is a shy woman, not a liar. I stood up, slowly, and went around the table to her, and I took her hands in mine. “Baby,” I said, “I am not angry at you. But I need you to understand something. Your husband did not take from me because he is wicked. He took from me because he believed that an old woman on a pull out couch could not feel it.” Keisha began to cry in earnest, and I held her, and over her shoulder I watched my son put his face in his hands.
Then I set the terms, in the voice that Otis used to call my deacon voice. The payments from Marcus would come to me from now on, to my own account at the credit union on State Line Avenue, with a letter to Marcus on Monday. Reggie would repay the twenty eight thousand, six hundred dollars, a little each month, by check, and Keisha would hold the checkbook. The house would be put on the market if it came to that. “And I am leaving the couch today,” I said. “I have been looking at a small brick house on Pine Street, with a porch and a stove. I put money down last week.”
Reggie pushed back his chair. “Mama, wait.” He knelt on the linoleum, a man of fifty one, and he took the razor from the table and held it in both hands, as one holds something that might wake. “I stood in that shop when I was nine years old,” he said, “and watched Daddy strop this on the leather. He let me hold it once. I was so scared I did not breathe.” He swallowed. “I have disgraced this. I have disgraced him.” I said he had not, yet. I said there was still time for him to hold the thing the right way. And Reggie, for the first time since the funeral, wept without trying to hide it.
That evening I drove to State Line Avenue. The pole was turning in the window, red and white, and Marcus was sweeping up the last hair from a Friday afternoon. He looked up and took off his glasses. I laid the long white envelope on the counter, and I told him the whole thing, and when I finished, he said nothing.
Then I took a pen from my purse and wrote on the back of the note. Paid in full, the last line said, and under it my name and the date. “Miss Edwina,” Marcus said, with his voice shaking, “I still owe a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.” I said that Otis had told me the note was for my groceries. I had decided I did not need that many.
Reggie came to the shop on Saturday and swept it, without being asked, for the first time in thirty years. Marcus handed him the broom and a cup of coffee, and the two men stood for a while looking at the picture of Otis on the wall. The pickles went on the shelves of the grocery stores in March, Miss Edwina Chow Chow, with a small drawing of a green tomato on the lid, and Keisha sent me a photograph of the first jar in her aisle. Underneath she had written, in her round hand, I turned this one around and read the label. I always will. I put it on the refrigerator of my little brick house, beside the razor.