The voice on the phone was soft and wet, like a person who has been crying for an hour and has finally run out. “Mrs. Gaudet,” she said. “Please do not hang up. My name is Lacey Arceneaux. I am the woman from the payment window. I am so sorry. I did not know what else to do.” I stood on my porch step with the phone against my ear and the detective watching me from the yard. I put it on speaker, and he nodded. I said, “Lacey, where are you right now?” She said, “In the parking lot of your church. I am afraid to get out of the car.”
We drove there together, the detective and I, in his gray sedan. Detective Okonkwo had the kindest tired eyes. We found her in a little blue Corolla under the live oak behind Sacred Heart, still in her scrubs from the nursing home, with her forehead against the steering wheel. When she saw us she opened the door and got out and stood there with her hands open, like a person surrendering. “Orbie is alive,” she said in one breath. “He is at my house. He is safe. I have been keeping him since February. I did not take a penny that was not for him.”
She lived on a narrow street in Bossier City, in a yellow house with a ramp built of plywood. Inside, in a sunny front room, in a big recliner under a crocheted afghan, sat an old man with a white crew cut and a plaid shirt buttoned to his throat. He looked at the three of us come through the door and smiled like a child at a party. He had a plate of grits on a tray. He said, “Well, look who it is,” and looked straight at me, and said, “Bernice Gaudet. Is Alcide parking the truck?”
A man who loses his memory may keep one fact bright as a coin, and that fact is who was kind to him.
I put my hand on the arm of the recliner. I could not speak. I had not seen Orbie Tull in four years, since the funeral of my husband, and I had not known until that very moment that he knew me. Lacey told the story in a rush, standing in her kitchen, with her hands twisting a dish towel. On a freezing night in February, she had found Orbie wandering on Pierremont Road in his slippers at two in the morning, shaking and confused. The church had not yet missed him. She took him home and wrapped him in blankets and called no one, because she was afraid.
She had seen what happens, she said. She works with the old. If Adult Protective Services placed Orbie in a facility, his house would be sold, his things dispersed, the quilts of his wife thrown in a dumpster. He had no family. His wife Mavis had died in 2015, and he had no children. He begged her, in his clear hours, to let him stay in the world he knew. So she had arranged to take care of him, quietly, and to use the Social Security check for his food and his medicine. And the electric bill on his old house, because he kept saying the freezer must not go off.
“What is in that freezer?” the detective asked, very gently. Lacey wiped her face on her sleeve. “Come and see,” she said. We drove to Pierremont Road, and she led us down the basement steps into the cool hum of the machine. She raised the lid. Inside, stacked in rows like books on a shelf, were frosted white containers, quart after quart, a hundred and forty of them, each labeled in blue marker. Gumbo, 2021. Boudin, 2022. Red beans, Sunday for Alcide. And on the lid, in the shaking letters of Orbie, a sentence. For Bernice, wife of Alcide, when I am gone.
I sat down on the basement stairs. I remembered it then, all at once. For nineteen years, every Sunday after Mavis died, my husband had driven to Pierremont Road with a bag of groceries and a Bible, and he had sat with a lonely man at a kitchen table, and he came home with a quart of gumbo in a frosted container. I had never asked why. I had thought it was a church errand. Alcide had never said a word. The freezer was full of the Sundays of my husband, and the old man had saved every one, as if saving the man himself.
Detective Okonkwo went through the accounts of Lacey for two weeks. He found every receipt, every grocery slip, every medicine bottle. She had not spent a dollar on herself. She had used her own paycheck for the rent. He closed the case with a one page report, and then he did something I did not expect. He drove to the probate court himself and spoke to the judge, a woman who had known my husband. In April, the court named Lacey and me as co guardians of Mr. Tull, and permitted him to live in his own house, with Lacey in the spare room and a home nurse on weekdays.
On Sundays, I drive to Pierremont Road with a bag of groceries and a Bible. Orbie sits at the kitchen table in his plaid shirt, and we heat a quart of the gumbo in a pot, and Lacey brings corn bread, and the three of us eat together. Orbie sometimes asks where Alcide is. I tell him Alcide is with Mavis, and he nods and says, “They are playing cards.” Then he eats another bowl. I still pay my electric bill in person on Thursdays, at the window on Texas Street, and the clerk always says hello.