“…every Whitley in Potter County,” I said later, when people asked how I had found her, “and I started dialing.” It took four hours. I sat at my kitchen table in the mobile home with the Amarillo phone book open to the W section, a pot of coffee going cold beside me, and Ray old clipping flattened under a salt shaker. Eleven numbers were disconnected. Three were answered by men who had never heard of a Dolores. One woman called me a telemarketer and hung up. The fifteenth number rang six times. A tired woman answered, in a soft voice. “Whitley residence.”
I said, “Hello, my name is Marlene Pruitt. I am looking for a Dolores Ann Whitley. She would have lived in Amarillo in 1996.” There was a long silence. Then the woman said, very slowly, “This is Dolores. Why are you asking?” I took a breath and said that my husband was Ray Pruitt, brother of Dwayne Pruitt, and that I had found a newspaper clipping in his old Army footlocker. I heard her sharp intake of breath. In a whisper she said, “Ray Pruitt. Ray was the only one who ever came back.”
She asked me to meet her at the Dairy Queen on Sixth Avenue the next afternoon. I drove into town in Ray old truck, wearing my church dress, with the clipping in my purse and my heart going like a drum. She was waiting in a corner booth, a slight, gray haired woman of fifty four in a faded denim jacket, with deep lines at the corners of her eyes and a plain gold cross around her neck. She stood up when I came in. We looked at each other. Then she held out both hands, and I took them.
A newspaper clipping from October 1996, a phone book open to the W section, and a name nobody in the family had ever heard.
She told me her story over two cups of coffee. In 1996, she was twenty five, a single mother with a six year old son who had asthma. She rented a little house on Hughes Street from a man named D. Pruitt. When her son was hospitalized for three weeks, she fell behind on her rent. Dwayne gave her forty eight hours. He had the sheriff set her furniture on the lawn, in October, in the rain, while she was at the hospital. Ray had happened to drive by that evening. He had stopped his cattle truck, climbed out, and carried her mattress back inside.
“He paid the rent for three months,” she said. “Out of his own pocket. He never told his brother. He never told me why. He just said, ‘Miss Whitley, nobody should have to sit on a curb. I tried to pay him back. He would not take it. I never saw him again.” She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin. “I did not even know he was gone until you called.” I told her that Ray had never spoken of it, not once in forty four years, and that I had learned who he really was only after he left me.
I laid the Mutual of Omaha letter on the table. I told her that Ray had changed his policy in 1997 to name her, with a note in his own hand. For Dolores. For what my brother did. She deserves it more than anyone. She read the page and then she put her hand flat on her chest. “Mrs. Pruitt,” she whispered, “I cannot take that. It is your husband money. It belongs to his family.” I said, “Dolores, you are his family. He made you family. I am only keeping my promise to a good man.”
She did not accept right away. We talked for three hours, until the waitress turned off the neon sign. At last she said she would take it, if I let her put a portion toward her son, who was now a nurse at Northwest Texas Hospital, and toward her mother care. I said that was exactly what Ray would have wanted. We hugged in the parking lot, two old women in the dusk, and she told me she would light a candle for Ray every Sunday at St. Mary. I promised I would light one, too.
Crystal did not take it well. She arrived at my door on Saturday in a rage, with Kevin trailing behind her, red faced and silent. She said the policy was a mistake, that she had already paid a deposit on the truck, that I had humiliated them in front of the whole family. I let her talk. When she paused for breath, I said calmly, “Crystal, you never once asked to see the policy. You decided what was yours. That is a very different thing from what was owed.” She opened her mouth, and then she closed it.
Kevin stayed after she left. He sat on the porch step in the cold, rubbing his hands, and for a long time we did not talk. Then he said that he was sorry, that he had let Crystal run ahead, and that he had always been a little afraid of what his father silence meant. I told him that his father had been a quiet man who did right and did not announce it. Kevin nodded, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. “I want to be more like him,” he said. “I mean it, Mom.”
In the spring, I received a card from Dolores, with a photograph tucked inside. It showed her and her grown son, in blue scrubs, on the steps of the hospital, holding a framed photo of Ray in his cattle truck, which I had sent them. On the back she had written, in careful cursive: He carried my mattress back inside. Tell the world. That night, I took the old footlocker out of the shed, set it in the middle of the living room, and put Ray Army uniform back inside, folded neatly, with the clipping on top.