Frank looked at the photograph on the kitchen table, and then at me, and his hands trembled on the edge of the oilcloth. “Bev,” he said, “the little girl is named Elena. She is thirty two years old now. She is my daughter.” I sat down slowly in the chair across from him, in the same kitchen where I had fried ten thousand pork chops and washed forty one years of dishes. I am Beverly Novak, seventy four years old, and the room did not spin the way I had been afraid it would. It went completely still.
He told me in a low voice, with his eyes on the table. In February of 1993, on the first fishing trip that Leon had planned, he met a woman named Rosa at a diner in Tucson. They spent two weeks together. He came home to Iowa, and he told himself it was over. In the fall, a letter came to Leon, and Leon brought it to Frank in the barn. Rosa was going to have a baby. Frank had been sending money since the day Elena was born, and he had flown to Arizona every February to see her.
“Why did you never tell me?” I asked. My voice sounded very calm to me, the voice of a woman at the end of a long shift. Frank pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and held it against his mouth. “Because I was afraid you would take the boys and go,” he said. “I told myself I was protecting you. I was protecting me. And every year it got harder, until the lie was the shape of our whole house.” He swallowed. “I am so sorry, Bev. I have been sorry for thirty years.”
A locked tackle box opened with a screwdriver gave one hospital laundry worker the length of an Iowa evening to bring her husband back to the truth in Cedar Rapids.
I gave my terms with my hands folded on the oilcloth. “Frank, I am not going to throw a plate at you tonight, though I want to. Listen. You will call our sons this week and tell them the truth, yourself. You will take me to Tucson in February, and I will meet this woman and this girl. The two point six million dollars will be divided in three, a third for me, a third for Elena, and a third for the boys. And tomorrow morning, you are buying me a pair of hearing aids, the best ones in Cedar Rapids, before you buy yourself so much as a new lure.”
Frank bent forward and put his forehead on his folded arms. “Bev, I am a coward,” he said, muffled. “I have been one since 1993. I wanted two lives and I was too weak to choose, and so I stole from both. I took your trust and I took her father. I do not deserve a single one of your terms.” He lifted his gray head. “But I will do every one of them. I swear it on my mother.” I looked at the old man in the faded flannel, and I did not hate him. I was too tired and too clear.
But his courage lasted only a moment. Frank snatched the photograph and the brokerage statement off the table, and shuffled out the back door into the yard in his stocking feet, meaning to burn both in the steel barrel by the fence. He crossed the grass. At the gate, a battered pickup rolled up and stopped, its engine rattling. Leon climbed out of the cab. And from the passenger side stepped a small woman in a green sweater, and beside her a tall young woman with the very chin of Frank, holding a suitcase in both hands.
Frank stopped by the burn barrel with the photograph pressed to his chest and the cold wind lifting his thin hair. Nobody spoke for a long moment. Then Leon took off his cap. “Frank, I told you I could not carry it any longer,” he said. “I called them on Tuesday.” The young woman looked at the old man in his socks, and her eyes filled, and she did not step forward or back. She only said, in a soft voice, “Hello, Dad.” Frank dropped the statement. The wind took it across the yard like a bird.
The consequences were quiet and long. Frank called both of our sons that same week, and the older one hung up on him, and the younger one drove down from Des Moines that night. We went to Tucson in February, and I sat at a small kitchen table with Rosa and ate her tamales, and we talked for six hours like two women who had been carrying the same bucket from opposite ends. Elena and I walked to the mailbox together. She told me she had always wondered what kind of woman could love a man so careful.
In the name of my mother Lucille, who passed in 2008, I started the Lucille Hruska Fund. It pays for hearing aids for seniors on fixed incomes and for nursing school tuition for hospital workers, in Linn, Benton and Johnson counties. In the first year we fitted one hundred and two people with hearing aids and sent seven hospital laundry and kitchen workers to nursing school. One was an eighty one year old man from Marion who heard the voice of his wife clearly for the first time in six years, and who sat in the audiologist chair weeping.
On a bright Saturday in June, I sat on the back porch with a glass of iced tea and my new hearing aids, listening to the whole yard. A mockingbird. A lawn mower three houses down. Frank, at the picnic table, laughing in a strange new way with two grown sons and a daughter from Arizona, arguing about whose turn it was to flip the burgers. Elena looked over at me and lifted her hand. I waved back, and I heard clearly, from across the grass, the clink of the ice in my glass.