Pastor Willis opened the journal of 2021 at the ribbon, and I saw the old blue ink of my gold nib on the page. The room was my own kitchen, with the sun on the yellow curtains and the smell of coffee. Rebecca stood at the doorknob, and the deputy, Ray Cobb, stood at her back, and the young woman from the publishing house, Vera Coleman, set her briefcase gently on my table. Pastor Willis read the entry slowly, in his Sunday voice. It began with the date, and under the date, the words, Today Rebecca came home from Memphis.
He read what I had written that night, with the arthritis in my hand and my daughter asleep in the next room. I wrote that she had held my face in both hands in the car and promised me she was done with the pills. I wrote that I did not believe her entirely, but that I loved her entirely, and that a mother has to love ahead of what she can prove. And I wrote one more sentence, which I had forgotten until that moment. If you ever hear this read aloud, Rebecca, then you have gone back to it, and I want you to know that I have already forgiven you. Come home, baby. The porch light is on.
Rebecca made a sound I had not heard from her since she was a little girl. Her hand slipped from the doorknob. Pastor Willis closed the book gently, and Vera Coleman told the room, in a calm professional voice, what she had come to say. The contract had a clause that I had insisted upon in July. The royalties from the devotional book would go into a trust, and the trust would pay for any treatment Rebecca chose to accept, for as long as she needed it. No one could touch it except the trustee, who was Pastor Willis. The deputy had come only because of the four pharmacies, and he had a quiet question for my daughter.
A journal page read aloud gave one mother the afternoon to bring her daughter back to her faith in Tupelo.
I gave my terms from my chair at the head of the kitchen table, with the pen in my hand. “Rebecca, I will not have you taken away in a car today, and I will not have you sleeping in this house with those bottles. Deputy Cobb will go with you to Memphis tomorrow morning, and you will walk into the same center where you went before, and you will stay as long as they say. If you finish, the pharmacies will not press the matter. If you refuse, then I cannot stop the court, and I will not try. But I want you to choose. It is the only thing I have ever wanted for you.”
Rebecca slid down the wall of my kitchen until she was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator, her arms around her knees. “Mama, I am so tired,” she said. “I have been tired since the wreck. I told myself that if you were confused, then nothing I took would count. I took your pills and I told the church you were losing your mind so that no one would ever ask what I was doing. I am the one who lost it. I lost it in 2017, and I have been looking for it every day since.” She wept into her knees, and the clock on the wall ticked.
Then a last hot panic flashed in her face, and she scrambled up, snatched the open journal from the hands of Pastor Willis, and ran for the back door with the book clutched to her chest as though she meant to throw it in the creek. She had one hand on the knob when Deputy Cobb, who is as tall as a refrigerator and as gentle as a lamb, stepped smoothly in front of the door and held out both palms. “Miss Rebecca,” he said softly, “that book is the only thing in the world that loves you right now. Please give it here.” She stood shaking. Slowly, she handed it over.
Pastor Willis laid the journal in my lap, and Rebecca did what I had prayed for fifteen years of Tuesdays to see her do. She crawled across the linoleum on her knees, which at fifty seven is not easy, and laid her head against my legs. I put my crooked hand on her hair, which had gone gray at the roots. I did not say a thing. The pen was still in my fingers, and as I stroked her hair, the gold nib left a small blue line on her collar, and neither of us noticed until a long time later.
The money consequences were gentle. The forged signature on the pain clinic bill was withdrawn by the clinic, and the four pharmacies agreed to a plan of restitution that Rebecca would pay from her wages after treatment. The three million, eight hundred thousand dollars from the publisher was divided as I had arranged in July, with a trust for Rebecca, a gift to the church for a new roof, and the rest under my name. Vera Coleman took the journals of 2021 back to Nashville in a velvet bag, and she promised, with her hand on her heart, to treat every page like scripture.
In the name of Thurman, who passed in 2019, I started the Thurman Pettigrew Fund. It pays for treatment beds, large print devotional books and rides to appointments for families in Lee, Itawamba and Pontotoc counties. In the first year we placed thirty one people in recovery programs. One was a retired schoolteacher of seventy in Pontotoc who had been hiding her pills from her grandchildren. Her pastor brought her to my kitchen. I read her the entry of October 14, and we both cried, and she asked if she could borrow the gold pen to write her own.
Rebecca came home from Memphis the following spring. She stood in my kitchen doorway in a green sweater, holding a paper bag from the bakery, and she said she had a gift. Inside was a spiral notebook, a plain one, with her name on the first page in her own hand. She told me the counselor had asked her to write one page every morning. I put the fountain pen of Thurman into her palm and closed her fingers over it. “Then use a good pen,” I said. She wrote the date at the top, and she began.