The old woman in the bedroom at the back of the blue house was named Etta Dupree, and she was eighty seven, small as a sparrow, propped on three pillows with a quilt over her knees. She held out one dry hand, and I took it without thinking. “Sit, child,” she said. “I have wanted to meet you for twenty two years.” I am Margaret Ann Holloway, seventy two years old, a deacon wife from Texarkana, and I sat on the edge of a stranger bed with a cashier check in my purse and a photograph of a little girl in a yellow Easter dress.
Etta told it plainly. In the fall of 1979, her husband Clarence was walking home from the night shift along the Bossier highway when a pickup truck came over the hill. The driver was twenty two years old, a pipefitter apprentice with a bottle under the seat. He did not stop. Clarence lost the use of both legs. The driver, Etta said, was my husband Dale. He came to her door in 2003, a deacon of a church, with his hat in his hands, and he told her what he had done.
I could not breathe. I looked at Lorraine, who stood in the doorway in her scrubs with the dish towel between her fists, and at the wall behind her, where a framed photograph showed a handsome man in a wheelchair, laughing. “Clarence forgave him on his last Christmas,” Etta said. “He said, Etta, the boy is crying more than I am. Make him promise to keep us from the poorhouse, and make him promise to tell his wife. Your husband kept the first promise. He was a coward about the second.”
A coffee can of carbon checks gave one deacon widow the length of a long drive to bring her son back to the truth in Texarkana.
I gave my terms there in the bedroom, with the hand of the old woman still in mine, in the voice I use for church business. “Mrs. Dupree, Lorraine, I will not lie and say this does not hurt. But my husband made a promise to your family, and I intend to keep it. The cashier check belongs to you, and so will every month of the payment, for as long as I live. My son Bobby does not need to know yet. I will tell him in my own time. And you will never again be a secret in my house.”
Lorraine crossed the room and knelt beside the bed, and tears ran down her tired face. “Mrs. Holloway, the checks paid for my nursing school and for the van and the roof,” she said. “Your husband came every other Saturday, and fixed the ramp, and sat with Daddy. I did not know he was hiding it from you. I thought you knew and had forgiven him. I am so sorry that you found out like this.” She laid her forehead on the quilt. “He was the best man who ever hurt us.”
We heard the front door open before we could say any more. My son Bobby, forty five years old, in his work jacket, had followed me from Texarkana in his truck, and he walked through the narrow house like a man who owned it. “Mama, I knew it,” he said. “Dad was keeping a woman.” Then he saw the check in my open purse, and his eyes went wide. He snatched it up and ran back down the hallway, out the screen door, and down the wheelchair ramp, shouting that the money belonged to the family.
He got as far as the gate. the neighbor of Lorraine, Mr. Tubbs, a big retired railroad man, shut it with his boot. Two women from the church across the street, in their Sunday hats, came down their porch steps with their purses over their arms. And Lorraine herself, who had run after him, stood on the ramp in her scrubs with her arms folded and said, in the steady voice of a night nurse, “Mister, you are standing on the ramp that your father built.” Bobby halted on the grass beside the ramp with the check crumpled in his fist, in the last gold light of the evening with the wind chimes on the porch ringing softly. He looked down at the treated lumber, the three supports, the galvanized screws, and I watched his face change. “Mama,” he said in a thick voice, “I owe a payday lender nine thousand dollars. I thought if I had this, I could stop. I did not know whose it was.” He walked up the ramp and laid the check in the hand of Lorraine.
The consequences were sober and tender. Bobby went to a credit counselor in Texarkana, and I paid off the nine thousand dollars with a check of my own, with the plain condition that he would sit with me every Sunday for a year. I told him the whole story at the kitchen table, from the highway in 1979 to the Folgers can, and he put his head on his arms. The next Saturday, we all drove to Bossier City, and the three of us repaired the back steps of the house of Etta with new lumber.
In the name of my husband Dale, who passed in the spring, I started the Dale Holloway Fund. It pays for wheelchair ramps and home repairs for disabled seniors and for nursing school tuition for caregivers, in Bowie, Cass and Miller counties. In the first year we built forty seven ramps and sent nine students to nursing school. One was a fifty two year old woman from Atlanta, Texas, who had cared for her own mother for ten years, and who wept in a classroom doorway holding her first set of scrubs.
On a mild evening in October, I sat on the porch swing that Dale had hung in 1979, with a glass of tea and the blue house in Bossier City on my mind. Lorraine and Etta sat beside me in the swing, the old woman small and shining in her good blue dress, with her great granddaughter in her lap. The wind chimes on the porch rang. Etta turned her face toward the sunset and smiled. “Maggie,” she said, “he would be so pleased.” I took her hand. “He would be ashamed,” I said, “and grateful. Both.”