The pawn ticket was a pale yellow slip, soft as cloth, with the name of a shop in Visalia printed across the top in red. On the front a clerk had written, one lady gold band, engraved, loan forty dollars, March 1985. At my kitchen table the next morning I turned it over, and on the back, in the loopy pencil I had known for forty four years, Cecil had written six lines. Dessie sat across from me with her white gloves folded on the head of her cane. Kyle stood by the stove. Kristi stood at the sink, and for once she was not wiping anything.
I read it out loud, slowly, because my voice would only work slowly. Dessie, I took this to pay a debt I never told you about. I paid it back in 1986, and I still could not bring it to you. I was a coward about the only honest thing I ever did. The ring is in the lining of the case. Please forgive me. The paper from the court was legal, I filed in Kern County in 1980 when I could not find you. C. When I finished, nobody moved. The refrigerator hummed. Outside a mockingbird was scolding the cat of the neighbor.
Dessie spoke first, in a dry, soft voice with Tulare still in it. She said she had left that town in the spring of 1979 to nurse her dying mother in Fresno, and had been so sure that Cecil would write that she never gave a forwarding address to anyone. When no letter came, she thought he had been killed on the road. She had not remarried, because she had never been sure. For forty six years she had gone to the courthouse in Tulare County on every anniversary and asked a clerk if there was any record of a Harmsen. The clerks were kind. They always said no.
A man can make a mistake at twenty three and spend the rest of his life learning to be gentle, and still leave one small thing undone.
Kyle drove to the Kern County courthouse that same Friday with the name of his father on a sticky note, and a clerk found the file in less than an hour. It had been filed in the summer of 1980, with notice published for six weeks in the Tulare newspaper, as the law then allowed. The decree was signed by a judge in September. I was standing in my kitchen when he called, and I sat down on the floor. I had been legally married to Cecil from June of 1981 to the day he died. I wept from relief, and I was not ashamed.
That evening I went to the hall closet and pulled out the old guitar case, the black one with the broken latch that had lived behind the vacuum cleaner since November. I felt along the lining with my fingertips. In the corner by the neck, there was a small stitched pocket, closed with a dab of glue. Dessie watched me from the doorway with her hand at her throat. I took a butter knife and opened it. Out dropped a thin gold band, worn bright on the inside and engraved with tiny script: D and C, June 4, 1977.
Dessie did not touch it at once. She stood very still. Then she took off her left glove and held the worn ring on her finger beside the one in my palm. They matched. One had been worn for forty six years, the other kept in the dark. “He kept it safe,” she said. “All this time, Velda, he kept it safe.” I closed her hand around it. I said it was hers. I told her that I had never had a quarrel with her, that I had only ever been given the part of the story that Cecil wanted me to have.
“There is one more thing,” she said, and took a breath. “The song with no words. The one he only hummed. I know the words.” I stared at her. She said that Cecil had written it for her on the porch of the house of her mother in the spring of 1977, in the week before the courthouse, and that he had sung it to her once and only once. Then, in a voice as thin as paper but perfectly in tune, she sang the first verse. It was about a man, a dusty truck, and a woman who waited at a screen door. I sat down on the kitchen chair. Kristi began to cry.
Kristi came to me at the sink later with her hands wrapped in a dish towel. She said she was sorry. She said she had thought she was doing me a kindness, that it was easier to clean out the pain than to live beside it. I told her that grief does not work that way, that it is a house and you have to learn the rooms. She nodded. The next Saturday she showed up with a new guitar stand of dark walnut, and on the base she had engraved, in tiny letters, For Cecil. I put it by the fireplace, and the guitar came home.
Dessie moved into the little duplex next door in June. She is eighty one years old and plays no instrument, but she has the sweetest alto on Union Avenue. Every Thursday we drive to the honky tonk, her in the passenger seat with her cane across her knees, and we sit on the little stage together, me with the old flat top and her in her white gloves. We play Silver Wings first, slow, then Act Naturally, and then, with a nod, the third song. The first time we sang it, twenty people stood up before we finished the chorus.
The red tortoiseshell pick is still stuck between the strings by the tuning pegs, where Cecil always kept it. I will not move it. Some nights after the show, when we are packing up, Dessie touches it with the tip of her finger as one touches a sleeping child. She says it is the only way she knows to say good night to him. I say that is the way I say it too. And then we turn off the lights, and the two of us walk out into the warm parking lot, two old women and one very good guitar.