On the next Friday, at ten minutes to eleven in the morning, I sat in the back seat of the black sedan of my neighbor Dewayne Pruitt across the street from my son insurance agency in Memphis, seventy nine years old, in a plain gray cardigan, with my purse in my lap. I had told no one where I was going except Destiny, the young receptionist who had pressed two hundred dollars into my hand and whispered the warning. She had said that every Friday a man came to the office, and that it was not about insurance. I intended to see him with my own eyes.
He came at eleven exactly, in a white pickup with a ladder rack, and parked in the handicapped space. A thin man of about forty, in a work jacket, with a baseball cap pulled low. He did not carry an insurance folder. He carried a small paper sack, the kind that holds a sandwich, and he went in through the front door as if he owned the building. Through the glass I watched Destiny stand up from her desk and walk away from it, quickly, toward the break room, and I watched my son Marcus come out of his office, holding out his hand.
My heart was beating in my ears like a drum. I had sold six hair salons in my life, built from one chair in the front room of my house on Lamar Avenue, and I had never been afraid to walk into any room in Memphis. I thought of Marcus at six years old, sitting on my salon floor with a coloring book. I thought of Odell, my husband, who passed in 2015 and who would have crossed that street already. I opened the car door and said to Dewayne, “Wait here, and keep the telephone in your hand.”
A Friday visitor watched from a parked car gave one mother the morning to bring her son back to her in Memphis.
I gave my terms in the doorway of the office, in the voice I used to use on rude customers. “Marcus. Sir. I am Gloria Whitaker, and I am here to say three things. First, that man is leaving this building and he is not coming back. Second, I have paid for a place for you at the Lakeside treatment center, and a car will take you there this afternoon. Third, nothing I have is going to you until you are well, and everything I have is yours, in a way you will not like, if you walk out that door with him.”
Marcus stood very still behind his desk, with the paper sack in front of him. His face crumpled, the way it did when he was small. “Mama,” he said, “I did not want you to find out. I have been trying to stop for three years. Every time I tried, I went back on Friday.” He sat down heavily in his chair and covered his eyes. “I am so ashamed. I am so tired.” I walked around the desk and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I had done when he had a fever as a boy.
The man in the work jacket did not like what he saw. He had been watching me with narrowed eyes, and now, with a muttered threat, he snatched the paper sack off the desk, and my own purse off the chair where I had dropped it, and bolted for the door. “Stop him!” I cried. But he was already on the sidewalk. He did not see Dewayne, who had stepped out of the sedan with his cane raised, and who planted it neatly in front of the shins of the thief. The man went down on the sidewalk like a sack of feed.
Dewayne sat on him, all two hundred and forty pounds of a retired mail carrier, and held the telephone to his ear with one hand. “Yes, officer,” he said, in a calm and cheerful voice, “I would like to report a Friday visitor.” Destiny had come out onto the steps, trembling, with her hands over her mouth. The police car arrived within three minutes. The man in the work jacket, who was known to the Memphis narcotics unit and had been wanted for six weeks, was taken away in handcuffs, still cursing the retired mail carrier of Lamar Avenue.
The money consequences were clear. Marcus went to Lakeside that very afternoon, and stayed ninety days, and I paid every cent of it. The insurance agency was kept running by Destiny, whom I promoted to office manager at a salary she did not believe. My own fortune of five point six million dollars was put into a trust, with a trustee, a bank in Memphis, and a clear rule that Marcus would receive his share in installments over ten years, as long as he stayed clean and kept going to his meetings.
In the name of Odell, who passed in 2015, I started the Odell Whitaker Fund. It pays for treatment beds, family counseling and rides to recovery meetings, in Shelby, Fayette and Tipton counties. In the first year we placed sixty three people in treatment and gave four hundred rides. One was a young mother from Millington who rode the bus for two hours each way until a volunteer driver started picking her up on Tuesdays and Fridays. She told me she had a Friday now that she looked forward to.
On a Friday in the spring, Marcus drove me to the little church on Lamar Avenue, eleven months clean, in a pressed shirt and a tie I had bought him. We sat in the third pew. He held my hand during the hymn, and when the preacher asked the congregation to greet one another, he turned and kissed my cheek. Afterward Destiny waved to us from the parking lot, with Dewayne beside her, holding his cane like a trophy. I told Marcus that his father would have been proud, and for once he did not look away.