The man in the leather jacket was named Darrell Voss, and he did not threaten me. He pulled out a kitchen chair, turned it around, and sat down with his arms folded on the back of it, as calmly as a man waiting for a bus. I am Wanda Tate, seventy years old, a retired oil company secretary from Bartlesville, and I stood in the middle of the kitchen of my son with my purse clutched to my chest. “Mrs. Tate,” he said politely, “your daughter in law owes me thirty one thousand dollars. She told me there was another account, an old lady account, that would settle everything by Friday.”
My son Jeremy sat on the couch with his hands hanging between his knees. He had told me to leave, but I had not. I looked at the empty White Claw can on the floor, at the stack of twenties on the coffee table, and at my daughter in law, pale and flat bellied in a crop top, pressed against the refrigerator. The other account was the one at the credit union, with the last one hundred and ninety thousand dollars that Bud and I had saved. I had never told Kayleigh it existed. But a woman who calls you Mama Wanda learns where you keep your mail.
Darrell leaned forward. “She came to me in March with an essential oils business that was failing, and borrowed against what she called her mother in law. She showed me your bank statements, Mrs. Tate, on her phone. She said you were soft. I do not like that word applied to a widow. I came today to collect, yes. But I also came to see if you were real.” He looked at Kayleigh. “I am beginning to think she lied to me, too.”
A pair of identical sonogram pictures on a refrigerator gave one retired secretary the length of a drive to Owasso to bring her son back to the truth in Bartlesville.
I gave my terms in that kitchen, in my church coat, with my hands flat on the counter. “Kayleigh, there is no baby. There never was. Jeremy, I love you, and I will not give another dollar to this house. Mr. Voss, you will take your debt up with the two people who owe it. Kayleigh will sign a paper tonight listing every dollar she took from me, thirty seven thousand, seven hundred, and she will repay it. And you will both sit down with me and tell me the truth, from the first sonogram.”
Kayleigh slid down the front of the refrigerator and sat on the linoleum, hugging her knees. “Wanda, I never had a miscarriage,” she said, in a small, shattered voice. “I could not have a baby. The doctors told me in 2020, and I could not say it to Jeremy. I made up the clinic because it was easier than telling him he would never be a father. Then the lie grew teeth.” She was crying freely now. “I spent your money on my business and my car. I am so sorry. I wanted you to love me, and I did not know how else to ask.”
But the room was hot with shame, and Jeremy broke first. He suddenly leaped from the couch, snatched the stack of twenties and the phone with the sonogram files from the coffee table, and bolted for the back door, meaning to run to his truck and drive until he could think. He yanked the knob. On the back stoop stood my neighbor Alexis, the young woman who worked in the OB office, who had followed my Buick in her little hatchback. Behind her stood two deputies. And the porch light came on.
Jeremy stopped in the doorway, in the cold evening, with the cash in one hand and the phone in the other, and the yellow light of the porch falling on the face of his mother, who had walked up behind him. I did not touch him. I said his name once, softly, the way I had said it on cold mornings when he was eight and would not get out of bed. He began to sob. The money fell from his fingers onto the concrete step, and the phone slid after it. He turned and put his arms around me.
The consequences were hard and honest. Darrell Voss, it turned out, was a licensed collector, and he agreed to accept a payment plan from Kayleigh and Jeremy once I explained the whole matter to the deputies. Kayleigh signed a confession of the thirty seven thousand, seven hundred dollars, and a repayment agreement that would take eleven years. Jeremy went to a counselor, and then took a second job at a tire shop. Kayleigh sat down with a doctor and finally said aloud what she had hidden.
In the name of my husband Bud, who passed in 2021, I started the Bud Tate Fund. It pays for fertility counseling and adoption costs for couples who cannot afford them and for scholarships in pipeline welding and the trades, in Washington, Nowata and Osage counties. In the first year we helped forty two couples and sent nineteen students to welding school. One was a thirty six year old woman from Dewey who held her adoption papers in a trembling hand and could not stop smiling.
On a bright day in June, I sat on the porch of my brick house in Bartlesville with a yellow knitted blanket in my lap, finishing the last row. Across the street, a young neighbor couple was welcoming home an adopted baby girl from Tulsa, with balloons on the mailbox. Kayleigh sat beside me on the glider, sewing a button on a tiny sweater. When I finished, I walked across the street and laid the yellow blanket in the arms of the new mother, and Kayleigh wept quietly on the glider, while the afternoon breeze lifted the pages of the old Bible on the porch rail and a mockingbird sang from the elm in the yard.