I lifted the lid, and there was not a stack of bonds or a jewelry pouch. There was one thing in that drawer. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, and I had to sit down in that little room, because it was a deed. A deed to a house.
A little two-bedroom over on Cherokee Street, on the poor side of Enid, that I had driven past my whole life and never thought one thing about. My mother owned it. Had owned it, free and clear, for near forty years, and not one of us four kids ever knew it existed.
Folded under the deed was a spiral notebook, soft with handling, and it was a list. First names, and dates, going back to the seventies. Donna, spring of seventy-six. A mother and two little ones, October of eighty-one. Sharon, and beside it just the words, got out safe. Page after page of women, and children, and dates, forty years of them.
My mama, the plainspoken Methodist bookkeeper who took us for dip cones and swore up and down she had no secrets, had quietly owned a little house on Cherokee Street for forty years and kept it for women who needed somewhere to run to. Women leaving men who hit them. Girls in trouble their families had thrown out. A mother and her babies with nowhere to go on a cold night. The word must have moved quiet, the way it does, church lady to church lady, nurse to preacher. If you are in trouble, go see about Miss Ada little house. She will not ask you a thing, and she will not turn you away.
She never charged a one of them a dime. She paid the taxes and the heat out of a bookkeeper wage for forty years, raising the four of us at the same time, and she never breathed a word of it, because I believe she knew that the second it became a known thing, a proud thing, it stopped being safe. The secret was the whole point. The secret was the mercy.
These were never my secrets to tell, so I never told them. But somebody ought to know it is here, once I am gone. Keep it open if you can. She had written that on the last page of the notebook.
I about came apart in that little bank room. My whole life I thought I knew exactly who my mother was. A good plain woman, nothing hidden. And she was more than that by a country mile. She was a quiet door that stood open for forty years to the most frightened people in this county, and she asked for nothing, and she told nobody, not even the children she loved, because the ones she was protecting mattered more to her than ever looking good did.
We are keeping it open. My sisters and I talked it through, and Miss Ada little house on Cherokee Street is going to go right on being exactly what she made it. There is a young woman and her two kids staying there right now, as I write this out, safe and warm. My mother had one secret in this world. It was the best-kept, kindest secret I ever heard of, and I am so proud of her I can hardly stand up under it.