I stepped through the side door of the fellowship hall into the bright dry wind of the parking lot with the old flip phone held to my ear, and I saw her. A small woman in a lavender cardigan sat behind the wheel of a rented sedan across the lot, with her own telephone in her lap. She lifted her hand from the wheel, very slowly. “Trudy,” said Marguerite, in my ear, “I have been sitting here since the burial. I did not have the courage to come in.” I am Trudy Larkin, fifty six years old, and I walked across the hot asphalt to the car and opened the passenger door, because there was nothing else on earth that I could do.
She told me everything over the rumble of the air conditioner. In 1970, her husband Remy Boudreaux had pulled my father out of a burning truck in Vietnam and had lost his own life in doing it. Before he went, he asked Harlan Larkin to hold the royalty money from an oil lease on his family land in Louisiana, so that his brother Antoine could never take it from Marguerite. My father agreed. He held it for fifty five years. It had grown to one million two hundred thousand dollars. She had only to call that number on the day she felt safe, and she never did, until the day she saw his name in the newspaper.
“Trudy, honey,” Marguerite said, gently, “I should tell you about your brother.” She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve. “In nineteen ninety eight, the bank in Shreveport called me as the beneficiary, because someone had forged the name of your father on a withdrawal for sixty two thousand dollars. Royce, it was Royce. Your father covered it from his own pension and made them promise to say nothing. I have known for twenty seven years.” The side door of the church banged. Across the lot, Royce stood on the steps of the fellowship hall in his dark suit, shading his eyes, staring at the car.
An old flip phone charged in a nightstand for twenty two years gave one daughter the length of a luncheon to bring her brother back to the truth in Lubbock.
I gave my terms standing at the open door of the car with Marguerite beside me, and Royce came across the lot slowly. “Royce, Daddy kept a promise for fifty five years, and you stole from it. Here is what will happen. You will put sixty two thousand dollars back, with interest, into the account that belongs to Mrs. Boudreaux. You will sell your truck lot if you must. You will go to the meeting at the church on Tuesday nights, and the pastor will go with you. And you will say you are sorry to this woman, to her face, today. That is the only way Daddy rests.”
My brother stood at the edge of the asphalt with his hands hanging, and his face crumpled like a child. “Trudy, I was thirty one,” he said. “I had a baby coming and a truck repossessed and a bankruptcy lawyer asking for sixty thousand dollars. I knew Daddy kept money in a safe place. I forged the paper and told myself I would put it back. Daddy never said one word to me about it, not once, in twenty seven years.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I thought he did not know. He knew. He knew the whole time, and he loved me anyway.”
But the old coward in him rose up. Royce lunged to the car, snatched the flip phone out of my hand and the small brass key off the dashboard that Marguerite had laid there, and ran back toward the fellowship hall, saying he had to look at something. He reached the side steps. A tall woman in a church dress, with a casserole dish in both hands, stepped into the doorway. Two more ladies in hats came out behind her with plates of pie and stood shoulder to shoulder. And the pastor, a gentle man in a gray suit, came down the steps with his hand outstretched.
Royce stood at the bottom of the steps with the phone and the key held against his chest, and the Lubbock wind blew dust across the lot. The tall woman with the casserole spoke in a warm, level voice. “Royce Larkin, I taught you in Sunday school. I do not believe that you are a thief. I believe that you have done a deed of a thief, and that is different.” Royce looked from face to face. Then he walked back across the asphalt, set the phone and the key in the palm of Marguerite, who was standing by the car, and he dropped to his knees on the hot pavement, and said, “I am sorry, Madam.”
The consequences were as plain as Texas. Royce repaid the sixty two thousand dollars with interest within the year, selling his lot and taking a job at the gin where our father had worked. He went to the Tuesday meetings with the pastor and did not miss one. Marguerite stayed in Lubbock for a month, in my guest room, and she and I sat on the porch in the evenings with glasses of tea. She took the key to the box in the bank in Shreveport and brought it home and found, just as he said, that every dollar was there.
In the name of my father Harlan, who passed in August, I started the Harlan Larkin Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of cotton gin and farm workers and for emergency help for the widows of veterans, in Lubbock, Hockley and Crosby counties. Marguerite gave the first gift. In the first year we sent twenty seven young people to college and helped fifty one widows with rent and medicine. One was the eighty year old widow of a Marine from Levelland, who had never asked for help in her life, and who wept at our door over a bag of groceries.
On the last Sunday in September, we all sat together in the fellowship hall at a long table with a white cloth, Marguerite at the head, Royce on her right and me on her left. The cotton fields outside the windows were white to the horizon. In the middle of the table sat the old flip phone, charged, with its little green light glowing. Marguerite picked it up and closed it gently. “Harlan told Remy that he would keep it charged until I called,” she said, “and he did.” She smiled at us both. “You may turn it off now.” And Royce, with great care, did.