I bent down, thumbed the new padlock on my old Army footlocker, and spun the dial to the numbers that Gloria and I had used for our wedding date. The lock fell open with a click. I lifted the lid. It smelled of cedar and mothballs and the inside of a barracks in 1971, and my son leaned over to see. “Dad,” he said softly. On top lay my dress uniform, folded in tissue, with the ribbons pinned over the pocket. Beneath it lay a thick bundle of paper tied with a bootlace, and when I handed it to Michael, he found that it was brokerage statements. Forty years of them. Every month. Every page.
He turned the top one over. “Account of Harold and Gloria Pruitt,” he read. “Total value: three million, two hundred and eleven thousand dollars.” He looked at his sister. Denise was sitting on the picnic bench with her purse still in her lap and her mouth slightly open. “Dad, what is this?” “It is every dime your mother and I saved,” I said. “She wrote a check on the last day of the month, whatever was left, and bought a share of something. Coca Cola. Johnson and Johnson. Walmart in 1983, when nobody thought a store in Arkansas would amount to much. We never touched it. Gloria used to say we were planting a pecan tree for people we would not live to see.”
The afternoon sun was falling through the oak trees onto the paper plates and the empty rib bones. A mockingbird was singing in the hedge. Denise said, in a small voice, “Daddy, you have been rich this whole time?” “I have been comfortable,” I said. “I did not tell you because I did not want either of you waiting on me to die.” I looked at my daughter. “I think I was right to worry. Because you did not wait, Denise. You decided to help the process.” Her husband had already left. His car was gone from the street. He had walked away down the block without a word.
An old Army footlocker opened at a backyard barbecue held forty years of savings that a daughter had never suspected.
Denise lifted her chin. It is a gesture I have seen on her since she was four years old, the one she makes when she is about to defend the indefensible. “I took care of you,” she said. “Michael lives two hours away. I drove you to every appointment. I did your shopping, your paperwork. Who put up with you in your bad years? Who emptied the trash after Mama died?” I told her the truth. “You did. And I was grateful, Denise. I would have given you anything you asked for. All you had to do was ask.” I picked up the page from the bank. “Instead, you put your name on my account with a signature that I did not sign.”
She had no answer. I turned to Michael. “Son, I have something for you.” At the bottom of the footlocker, wrapped in a flannel shirt, was a long white envelope. Inside was a cashier check for nineteen thousand dollars, the sum he had sent for my groceries, and a second check that was a different size. “That is for the years I should have asked you home more often,” I said.
Michael looked at the figure. His eyes widened. “Dad, I cannot take this.” “It is not a gift,” I said. “It is called back pay.” He put his face in my shoulder, and we stood there a while, two grown men in a backyard.
When Michael had composed himself, he asked what I meant to do about Denise. I had spent four nights on the question. I had called an attorney in Raleigh, a man I trusted. I told Denise what I had decided in plain words. “I am removing your name from every account today. I am not going to press charges. But I want you to see a counselor, for the money problems and the lies. If you will do that for a year, I will pay for it, and I will pay off the loan on your house.” She stared at me. “And if I will not?” “Then I will,” I said, “with great sadness, call the sheriff.”
Denise began to cry, great ugly sobs that bent her over the table. I let her. The mockingbird went on singing. After a time I walked around the bench, and I sat beside her, and I put my arm around her shoulder, the way I had when she was seven and had scraped a knee. “I was so afraid,” she gasped. “The house, and the bills, and I thought if I could just get ahead, once. I never meant it to be you.” “I know,” I said. “But it was. And now you will do the work of mending it, and I will be on the porch the whole time. That is what fathers are for.”
She began meeting with a counselor named Mrs. Yates on Tuesdays. The first few weeks she came home swollen eyed and furious. By Christmas she brought me a loaf of banana bread and said she was sorry, in complete sentences, with no excuses. She repaid Michael in full, out of her own paychecks, over eleven months. Her husband came back, thin faced and ashamed, and I shook his hand on the porch and told him the past was the past. Michael started coming down on the first Saturday of every month, with his two boys in the back seat, and we grill ribs, and I teach the boys to play horseshoes.
With the rest of the money, I did what Gloria and I had always intended. I started a scholarship at the community college for children of military families, eight full rides each year, named for her. I bought a new roof for the church on Raeford Road. And on a hot July afternoon, I took Denise and Michael and their families to a lawyer office, and the three of us sat down and read my will. When Denise heard the part that left her an equal share, she looked at me across the table and mouthed two words, thank you, and I mouthed back, I know.