“Open the door, Manny,” I said, “but stay close.” My sister Wanda stood at the bottom of my porch steps in the long blue coat, with the streetlight on her white hair, and Kyle stood a careful three steps behind her, jingling his keys. I had not seen her since the day Hollis was laid to rest in Llano Cemetery, when we said terrible things in the parking lot over our mother will. I stepped out onto the porch in my house slippers. “Hello, Wanda,” I said. “It has been a long time. You look just like Mama.”
“Loretta, I did not come to take anything,” she said, and her old voice shook. “This young man called me in Tulsa on Monday. He said you were broke and alone and that you could not manage your money, and that I should come sign papers to become your guardian, since I am your only living sister. He paid for my bus ticket. I rode all night.” She lifted her chin, and I saw Mama jaw. “I got off that bus in Amarillo and I looked at your yard, and your porch light, and your name on a truck. Loretta, you do not look broke to me.”
Kyle took one step forward. “Mama Lo, she is confused,” he began, and he laughed his dealership laugh. “I never said any of that. I just thought the family should be together, and a man from the title company is available to help.” He turned toward the silver sedan. There was nobody in it. The passenger seat held only a clipboard and a Starbucks cup. I looked at Manny, and Manny looked at the clipboard, and without another word Manny walked to the car, opened the door, and picked up the papers.
A sister came home after twenty two years, a fraud was stopped at the front door, and a bus pass finally got used.
Manny read the top sheet under the streetlight. “Petition for temporary guardianship, filed in Potter County,” he said in a heavy voice. “Signed by Wanda Pruitt Lyle. Notarized. Filed Thursday. The petitioner asks the court to grant control of all assets of Loretta Pruitt, including proceeds of any recent sale, on grounds of dementia.” He looked up. “Miss Loretta, they were going to take everything, and you would have found out when the bank stopped honoring your checks.” Wanda put one hand to her mouth. “I never saw that page,” she whispered. “He only showed me the last one.”
A car turned into Bowie Street then, and I could hardly believe my eyes. Shana. My own daughter, still in the sequined blouse from her birthday, with her makeup half gone and her phone in her hand. She got out and ran, as well as a woman of fifty can run in heels, and she stopped in front of her husband. “Kyle, tell me this is not true,” she said. “Tell me you did not move my mother mail to our house. I found the forwarding card in your truck tonight when I went to get my purse. You told me it was for her surprise party invitations.” Kyle opened his mouth. No sound came out.
“Shana,” I said, as gently as I knew how, “I am not going to ask you to choose tonight. But you need to hear me. I am not broke, and I never was. I have more than your father ever dreamed of, and I was going to tell you in my own time, and this is not how I wanted it said.” I looked at her husband. “Kyle, you will be arrested on Monday for mail fraud and attempted forgery of a court filing. Not by me. I already called the postal inspector this afternoon, when the card came, because I am not a fool.”
Kyle went the color of the sidewalk. He tried to speak, and Manny moved just a step closer, and that was the end of that. By Monday morning the inspectors had his phone, his forged petition, and a recording from Javi, who had worn a wire for the Potter County sheriff at my request. Kyle lost his job at the dealership. He sold the Silverado to pay a lawyer, and last I heard he sells insurance in Lubbock, and he is not the biggest fish in anybody pond. Shana moved into my guest room with a suitcase and a stack of unpaid bills, and I held her all night.
Wanda stayed. She took the back bedroom and the quilt from Mama house, which I still had, and for the first week we hardly spoke. Then one evening at supper she said, “Loretta, I have been angry for twenty two years about a piece of land that neither of us ever needed.” I said I had been too. We laughed, then we cried, then we ate the whole pie. In the spring I signed the Bushland acres over in her name and mine, jointly, and a stone house is being built on it, for the two of us to grow old in.
The second payment from Dallas came in on the first of December, and I used some of it to start the Hollis Pruitt Driving School for Women, in the old yard on Amarillo Boulevard. Every student gets a commercial license, a job offer at Pruitt, and a seat in a Peterbilt. Manny runs the road tests. Shana teaches the safety class. The first Saturday we opened, forty three women lined up around the block in cowboy boots and church shoes, and a girl of nineteen asked me if it was true I drove a truck at seventeen. I said at sixteen, honey.
On my eightieth birthday, Wanda and I rode the Number 4 bus to H E B, with the bus pass from the gift box in my hand. The driver looked at the picture on it, and at me, and he said, “Miss Loretta, that is not a very good photo.” I said, “No. But it is the best present I ever got.” Wanda leaned her head on my shoulder as the bus rolled down Bowie Street, past the yellow brick house, past the red truck parked under the elm, and we rode all the way to the end of the line just to see how it looked.