Part 3 — The Hospice Call
The voice of Peggy went on, quiet as a lamp. “The person who called was Rodney Pierce. He said he was my agent. He asked them to lower my morphine so I could sit up and sign my own name. The nurse, a good woman named Carla, said no. She wrote it down. She told her supervisor. They did not change one drop, and I was comfortable until the end. I want you to know that, Clyde. I was never in pain.”
Tammy let go of the pew. She did not scream. She walked out of the pew and down the center aisle, the whole length of the church, and stopped in front of the man she had married. “Is it true?” “Tam, it was only for a minute. She was going to sign anyway. It was a way of keeping her calm.” “It was a way of keeping her awake,” said my daughter. “Daddy would have called it by its name.”
And then she did what I will remember on the day I die. She took the wedding ring from her finger and laid it on the microphone stand, softly, like a coin in an offering plate, and she walked back to the pew and sat down beside me. She took my hand in both of hers. “Daddy,” she said, “I am so sorry. I should have listened.” I said she was listening now, which was all anyone had ever needed from her.
The deputy in the fourth pew, whose name was Ray Lujan, buttoned his jacket and moved up the aisle without hurry. Three hundred people parted for him. The sheriff of Taylor County, he said, had received the copies from Miss Lettie on Thursday and had spoken to the annuity company and to the hospice. The blue ink was a matter for a handwriting examiner, and the call to hospice was a matter for a judge. He asked Rodney to step outside, and Rodney, in his nine hundred dollar suit and pink pocket square, went.
What followed was not a spectacle, and I am grateful. The congregation stayed in its pews. Miss Lettie raised her hand, and the choir stood, and without a word the voice of Peggy rose again out of the loft in the voices of forty women and nine men. They finished the verse that her recording had begun. “Though Satan should buffet,” they sang, “though trials should come.” Women who were sobbing stopped, and then began again, a different kind of sobbing.
The law finished the rest. The handwriting examiner of the state compared the blue-ink signature with eleven specimens of Peggy and found no resemblance. The annuity company reversed the withdrawal under its fraud rules, and the $73,000 went back into the account, with interest, in March. Rodney was charged with forgery, exploitation of an elderly person, and interference with the care of a hospice patient. He pleaded guilty in the summer.
The judge in Abilene gave him a sentence of years, not months, and supervision after that, and he lost the storefront on South 14th, the face on the window, and the license that had let him call himself a financial planner. The betting application had been on his phone, as I suspected, and the records showed the money had gone into it within the same week. The judge did not raise her voice. She said that some people spend a lifetime learning how money works and still do not learn what it is for.
Tammy moved back into her old bedroom in my house. For a while she did not do anything, and I let her. She slept late and washed the dishes at midnight and sat in the kitchen with the lamp on. In March she asked if I would take her to Grace Baptist on Sunday. We sat in the same pew where Peggy had sat for forty-one years, and when the alto line rose in the second verse she moved her lips, and no sound came, and then it did.
Miss Lettie came for lunch the next week with a green bean casserole. She is eighty-four, and she does not drive after dark, so she brought her great-nephew to deliver her. She said that Peggy had come to her in September with a plan, and that she had told Peggy to tell me, and Peggy had said, “Clyde would worry himself to death. Let me carry it.” I told Miss Lettie that my wife had been carrying me for most of my life, and that I had mostly let her.
I took the statement out of the glove box of the old Peterbilt behind the barn and carried it into the house. I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like the state of Texas, where the whole family could see it. When the money came back I paid the funeral home, the hospice and the lawyer, and then I gave the remaining sum to the music fund of Grace Baptist in the name of Peggy. The choir bought new robes, blue ones, and a good microphone.
The sweetest voice in the room belonged to a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, and she did it with a recording and a smile. I played the CD one more time that night, alone, in the den, with the sound turned low. When it reached the second verse, I sang along, badly, the way I always had, and for the first time since December, I did not stop.
Out on the ranch road the truck sat in the dusk with its hood open to the wind, the way I leave it, because it likes the air. The cab smells of coffee and old leather and a little of the perfume of Peggy, which I have never had the heart to wash out. I climbed in and sat behind the wheel for a long time. Two and a half million miles, and not one accident. I put my hands at ten and two and drove nowhere at all.