Rick read the third page in the kitchen of my own house, and his lips went gray. It was a typed list of eleven names, with a figure beside each one, and the first name was the man in Shawnee, Duane Pickett, to whom he owed forty one thousand dollars. I am Ruth Ellen Pruitt, eighty one years old, standing in my robe on the linoleum I had paid for, and I let him read it twice. The refrigerator hummed. The clock over the stove said twenty past eleven. Tammy had gone to the sink and was gripping the edge of it with both hands.
“Where did you get this?” Rick whispered. I told him that my lawyer, Mr. Teague, had spent two weeks at the courthouse and on the telephone, because Dwayne had taught me that a woman who owns a house must know who owes what inside it. Rick had borrowed from eleven people in four years. Duane Pickett had sold his note to a collection firm in August, and the firm, in need of cash, had sold it to a small company in Tulsa for sixty cents on the dollar. The company was mine. It had been mine for eight days.
Rick sat down on a kitchen chair as if his legs had been cut from under him. “You bought my debt,” he said. “You, Ruth. You.” I told him that I had bought all eleven, a little at a time, with money from the sale of our old place, and that the total came to one hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. I had done it for one reason. A man who owes strangers can be frightened. A man who owes his mother in law can be helped. Tammy turned slowly from the sink, and I saw that her mascara had run down to her chin.
An envelope set on a kitchen counter gave one mother the night to bring her daughter and son in law back home in Tulsa.
I gave my terms standing by the counter where the envelopes of cash had lain for two years. “The listing is canceled tonight. The woman in the red blazer will be called in the morning. Rick, you will go to the Thursday meeting at the Methodist church on Memorial Drive, and you will go with a counselor I have already found. You will not place another bet, and you will give your telephone to Tammy on Sundays. In return, every dollar on that list stays in a drawer until you have been well for three years. And I will move out of the laundry room into the back bedroom, where I belong.”
Tammy broke first. She crossed the kitchen and dropped to her knees on the linoleum, taking hold of the hem of my robe, and sobbed so hard that she could not form words. When she could, she said, “Mama, I charged you rent because Rick said you had too much money, and that if I did not, he would leave me. I put you by the water heater because he said the guest room was for his buyers. I hated myself every first of the month. I counted those envelopes in the bathroom and cried over every one.” I put my hand on her hair, which had gone gray at the roots, and held it there.
Rick said nothing. He was staring at the pages. Then, without warning, he snatched them off the counter, crumpled them in his fist, and bolted for the front door, perhaps meaning to burn them in the grill on the patio. He flung it open. On the porch stood the woman in the red blazer, Kay Dunleavy, with a young couple behind her, the first buyers for Friday, and on the walk behind them stood my lawyer Mr. Teague with his hat in his hand. The couple stepped aside. Kay did not. She stood in the doorway with her clipboard against her chest and said, “Rick, I believe the listing is withdrawn.” Rick ran straight into the clipboard.
Mr. Teague took the pages gently from his hand, smoothed them on the porch rail, and gave them back to me. I thanked the young couple and sent them home with an apology and a plate of lemon cookies. Then I sat Rick down on the porch swing, and I sat beside him, and for the first time in two years he looked at me without counting. “Ruth,” he said, thickly, “I was going to put you in a home. Not a bad one. I had picked it out.” I told him that I knew, and that I had picked out the lawyer first.
The money consequences were orderly. The house on the south side, worth three hundred and ten thousand dollars, stayed in the LLC, and I changed the beneficiary to a trust for my two grandchildren. The eleven notes, one hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars, I forgave in installments, one for each year Rick stayed away from the tables. Duane Pickett of Shawnee, notified by the lawyer, signed a paper promising never to contact my son in law again. And the six hundred and fifty dollars a month that I had paid for two years came back to me in a check from Tammy, which I framed.
In the name of my husband Dwayne, who passed in the spring of 2021, I started the Dwayne Pruitt Fund. It pays for family counseling, gambling treatment and legal help for older parents living in the homes of their grown children, in Tulsa, Creek and Osage counties. In the first year we placed thirty one people in treatment and helped eighteen grandparents move out of laundry rooms and garages. One was a widow from Sapulpa whose son charged her four hundred dollars a month to sleep on a porch. Mr. Teague took her case on a Friday and had her in a bright front bedroom by the next week.
Now it is Sunday evening, and the three of us sit in the kitchen with a pot roast and the radio. Rick passes the potatoes with both hands. He has not placed a bet in fourteen months, and on the first of every month he puts an envelope on the counter, not for me, but for the jar at the church, with the figure written on the front in his own hand. Tammy fixed up the back bedroom with a quilt of her grandmother. When I thanked her, she said, “Mama, the water heater is lonely without you.” We laughed until the roast went cold.