I put on my reading glasses, there on the dais of the council chamber, with the clerk waiting and the gavel in her hand and the room filling up with folding chairs, and I read the poll book from Precinct 2 slowly, one line at a time, as if it were a letter from a friend. Calloway, Lyle W. The loopy L. The slanted y. The date of the election day. And in the column beside it, the ballot number, 611, the same as the number of doors I had knocked on all summer.
“Mama, Daddy has been dead for two years,” Shelby said from the chair beside me, in a thin, scared voice. “Somebody voted for him. Travis says it could void the whole election.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “He filed it for Wade, because Wade is too lazy to. I begged him not to. He said you had no business trying to be somebody.” I took the clipboard from her hands, and put my hand on her wrist, and I said, very gently, “Baby, look again at the middle initial.”
She looked. “W,” she said. “Not C.” I nodded. My Lyle was Lyle Clayton Calloway, and everyone in Arcadia who ever mailed him a bill had known it. The signature in the book was Lyle Walter Calloway, and Lyle Walter was the nephew of my husband, the son of his brother Buddy, twenty nine years old, who drove a truck for the county and lived on Oak Street. He had named his boy after his uncle, and he signed his name, as every man in that family does, with the same loop on the L that my Lyle had taught him on a birthday card.
I could not help laughing. It rose up in me the way a hiccup does at a funeral. “Shelby,” I said, “your cousin voted for me.” She gaped. “Lyle Junior? In Precinct 2? He came by the house in July and said he would put a sign in his yard, and I never thought he would show up at the polls.” I turned the book so the clerk could see the entry. “Madam Clerk, I believe the voter in question is a living registered voter in good standing, and I believe he can be verified by date of birth.”
The names a family hands down are a kind of inheritance, and sometimes the whole county has to stop and sort through the pronouns.
The clerk, a brisk woman named Mrs. Zimmerman, went to a laptop and typed. The council waited, six people in their folding chairs, along with a handful of citizens and one very sleepy reporter. She read out the record. Lyle Walter Calloway, born in 1995, registered since 2013, Precinct 2, voted. The room let out its breath. Wade Pickett, who had arrived and taken a chair at the back of the chamber, took off his cap and turned it round and round in his hands. “Well, shoot,” he said to nobody. “That settles it, then.”
The recount took place the next morning at the supervisor of elections office, in front of a lawyer for each side and a woman from the state. They ran every ballot through the machine twice and counted the paper by hand. The final tally was nine votes, for Bernadette Calloway. Mr. Pickett shook my hand at the end of it. He said that in forty years he had never once had a challenger he respected, and that he had slept through the meetings out of boredom, and that I was welcome to the seat. I said that I would try to keep awake.
Travis came to the porch that Sunday evening, alone, in clean boots. He did not put his feet on the cooler. He stood at the bottom of the steps with his cap in his hands, like a boy summoned to the principal, and I let him stand there a good long while. Then I patted the rocker. He sat. “Mama Bunny,” he said, “I filed a thing I did not understand because I was angry. I said things I should not have said. I am sorry. I would like to take it back.” His eyes were wet.
I told him I had never held a grudge for longer than the length of a pound cake. I told him that the girls were coming for Thanksgiving, all of them, and that he and his fishing buddy were welcome at the table, if they could be civil. Travis let out a sound like a man dropping a heavy load. Shelby came out of the kitchen with a pitcher of tea and her face shining, and Lyle Walter, my nephew, who had come over with a six pack of root beer, put an arm across the shoulders of his cousin and said that the family was finally behaving normally.
I have been on the council for fourteen months. I have not slept through a single meeting. We have fixed the drainage on Oak Street, which flooded every August, and put in a crosswalk by the elementary school and a new roof on the library. Travis volunteers for the cleanup crew on Saturdays, hauling debris in his truck. Wade Pickett, who stays a friend, comes to every meeting and sits in the back row with his arms folded, and every so often he says, quite loudly, “Hear, hear.”
On the first anniversary of my swearing in, the girls, Shelby and the two granddaughters, gave me a present wrapped in newspaper. It was a nameplate, gold, for my desk at home. Under BERNADETTE, in small letters, they had engraved a line. She knows your street. I set it next to the old blue and white cooler of Lyle, with his name still in marker on the lid. In the cooler, where the flyers used to be, I now keep the pound cake, for the neighbors who come by.