I called the Tucson number from the hot parking lot, and a woman answered, and when I said I was Toms wife, she went quiet, and then she said, I have been waiting thirty-four years to thank him, and I am so sorry he is gone.
Angela Reyes was not a woman Tom had loved. She was a woman he had hurt, by accident, on a highway outside Tucson in 1983, when he was twenty-two and driving too fast in the rain. She was six years old. She lived, but she spent years in treatment, and Tom, instead of running, had quietly sent her family money every single month for thirty-four years, and left her the four hundred thousand dollars so her care would never stop after he was gone.
He never told me because he could not bear for me to see him the way he saw himself.
The woman I thought was his secret was the child he had spent his whole life trying to make right.
Angela had something of Toms to give me. When I drove to Tucson to meet her, she put it in my hands. It was a shoebox of thirty-four years of letters Tom had written her, every month, with the checks, each one asking how she was, each one signed, a man who is sorry. He had never mailed the words, only the money. He kept the letters to send when he found the courage. He never did.
Angela is forty-eight now, a schoolteacher, with children of her own. We cried in her kitchen for a long time. I did not look at Tom the way he feared I would. I looked at forty-one years of a good man who had been carrying one terrible night, alone, and doing the only thing he knew to make it right.