“…in a lake cabin two hours from here, under the name Thomas Ellery Gray,” Warren said, his voice breaking. “Joyce, he is alive. He has been alive this whole time. Pamela told me he was gone, and I believed her for twenty years.” He sat on my sofa with rain dripping off his coat onto my rug, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. I stared at the photograph of the young man in the white tuxedo. Tommy Ellery, the boy who used to wave at me from his father pickup truck. The whole town had searched for him in 1996. My sister had worn black to the church service.
I made Warren tea, because it is the only thing I know how to do in a crisis. He drank it with both hands. Then he told me how he had found it. Cleaning out his office to move out, he had come across a locked file box that Pamela always kept in the closet. Inside were the albums, four of them, each with a different groom. A court order from 1997. A letter from a lawyer in Nashville. And a business card with a handwritten phone number. “I called it,” he said. “A man answered. He said, Is this about Pamela? Before I could speak he said, I have been waiting thirty years for someone to call.”
I looked at the albums spread across my coffee table. Four weddings, four smiling brides, all my sister, all radiant. The second groom had been a banker named Carl, who passed after a car accident in 2002 and left her a house. The third was a dentist named Leonard, who divorced her in 2009 and moved away, with no forwarding address. And now there was Warren, the fourth, a gentle retired engineer who had been married to my sister for twelve years and had apparently never been told anything at all. “Joyce,” he said softly. “I think your sister has a pattern.”
Four wedding albums, two suitcases, and a first husband who turned out to be living quietly two hours away.
We drove to the lake the next morning in Warren rented car. It rained the whole way. The cabin was small and weathered, with a green tin roof and a sagging porch, and a gray haired man in a flannel shirt was chopping wood in the yard. He stopped when he saw us. He knew me at once. “Joyce Calloway,” he said. “You used to bring me lemon bars at the garage.” I could not speak. He was fifty five now, thin and sunburned, with the same crooked smile. “Tommy,” I whispered. He set down the axe, and he opened his arms, and I walked into them like a woman coming off a long journey.
Over coffee on his porch he told us everything. He had married Pamela at twenty three. For two years it was happy, and then he found the loan papers she had forged with his name, for sixty thousand dollars she had spent on jewelry and trips. He confronted her. She wept and promised to stop, and then the next month he found the second set. “I told her I would go to the police,” he said. “She stood in our kitchen and smiled and said, Tommy, who will believe you? And she was right. Everyone loved her. So I did the only thing I could. I took my truck and I left.”
He had never gone back. A sheriff friend had helped him change his name, and a lawyer in Nashville had filed the court order that kept her from finding him. For thirty years he had lived in the quiet, working as a boat mechanic, fishing in the early mornings. “I thought of you often, Joyce,” he said. “I wanted to write. But I was afraid it would lead her to me.” Warren sat forward. “Mr. Gray, I need to ask something difficult. Would you be willing to give a statement? To a lawyer? I believe I am the fourth.” Tommy looked at the lake for a long time. “Yes,” he said at last. “I am tired of being afraid.”
Warren took the statement himself, on a yellow legal pad, while Tommy talked and the afternoon went gold on the water. When it was finished, Tommy signed each page slowly, with a hand that had not signed anything of the kind in thirty years. Warren folded the pages into his coat and shook Tommy hand with both of his. “I am sorry for what she did to you,” he said. “I am sorry for what she did to us both.” I stood at the porch rail and watched two men understand each other completely.
Pamela arrived at my door three days later, uninvited, in a camel coat and pearls. Warren had moved his things into a hotel, and the lawyer had filed papers that morning. She did not knock. She walked in, set down her purse, and looked at me with the sweet, brittle smile I had known my entire life. “Joyce,” she said, “I understand you have been poisoning my husband against me.” I put down my dish towel. “Pamela, I have not said a word to Warren that was not true.” She laughed. “You were always jealous. Even as a girl.” I looked at her for a long, quiet moment.
“I was never jealous,” I said. “I want you to hear that. For twenty years I sat at those dinners and listened to you describe your husband money and your house and your trips, and I felt only one thing. I felt sorry for you. Because I knew, somewhere deep down, that a woman who has to say it that loudly does not believe it herself.” Her face did not change. But her hand, resting on the back of my sofa, began to tremble. She stood there for a long time. Then she picked up her purse, and she left, and she did not slam the door.
The legal process took two years. Warren got a quiet divorce and a clean conscience. Carl daughter, who had always doubted the car accident, was contacted by the authorities, and the old files were reopened. I do not know how it will end, and I find I do not need to. Last month Tommy came to dinner. He brought a bottle of wine and a pie, and he sat at my table in a clean white shirt, and when the rain started up again on the windows, he looked at me over his glass and said, “Joyce, it is a good kind of Thursday.” I said it was. I said it was the best I could remember.