I did not wait for the pastor, and I did not wait for the sun to come all the way up. At six the next morning I drove to Huntsville, an hour and a half up the interstate, to the house of my son, Wade, a big two story brick home in a neighborhood with a gate and a fountain at the entrance. Wade was an engineer for the Army, forty seven years old, a deacon, a father of three. He opened the door in his bathrobe with a cup of coffee in his hand, and when he saw my face, the cup began to shake.
I did not need to ask him. I had spent thirty three years watching children try to lie to me with milk on their faces. I laid the bank statement on his kitchen island, and next to it the photograph I had taken of the two boys at the funeral, and I said, “Wade, they have the blue eyes of your father.” My son sat down on a stool. His wife, Denise, was upstairs getting the children ready for school. He spoke in a whisper. “Mama, I was going to tell you. I have been going to tell you for seventeen years.”
It came out in pieces. In the summer of 2008, Wade was twenty nine and newly married, working long weeks in Tuscumbia on a government contract. Tammy Rae Holt was nineteen, a waitress who sang in the choir at our church. It lasted one summer. When she told him she was expecting, he panicked. He was frightened of Denise, of the church, of me. So he went to the one person he trusted, his father, and Earl, God rest him, told Wade that he would carry the burden and keep it from me.
A secret kept out of love can still do harm, but love that finally speaks up can mend almost anything.
“Earl did not pay it from his own pocket,” Wade said, and he picked up his phone with trembling fingers. “I did. I sent him the money every month, in cash, a little at a time, and he put it through the account so Denise would never see it on my statements. He said the secret was mine, but the boys were his responsibility. He drove to Tuscumbia on Tuesday nights, Mama. He told you it was the lodge. He sat on the porch of Tammy Rae and helped the twins with their homework. He taught them to fish.”
I thought of every Tuesday night. I thought of the plate I left for him in the oven, and the way he came home smelling of woodsmoke and rain and said, “The lodge ran long, Sugar.” For seventeen years I had believed my husband was a plain man with a plain life, and all that time he had been keeping a second set of books for the love of two boys. I should have been furious. I was, for about an hour. Then I understood that Earl had been trying to be the father his own son would not be.
I told Wade to get dressed. Denise came down the stairs in her work clothes, saw the three of us in the kitchen, and stopped on the bottom step. I will give my son this much. He did not lie again. He told her himself, standing up, with his hands at his sides, and I sat at the table and held the bank statement flat so no one would see how my own hands trembled. Denise said nothing for a long time. Then she asked one question. “Do they know who you are?” Wade said, “No. They think I am a friend of Earl.”
Denise went upstairs and shut the bedroom door. Wade and I drove to Tuscumbia in my car without speaking. The little brick house with the basketball hoop was exactly as I had seen it. Tammy Rae opened the door before I knocked and burst into tears. “Miss Loretta, I am so sorry,” she said. “Earl told me he would explain to you when the time was right. He said that time would come.” I took her face in my hands, the way I used to take the face of a frightened child in my office, and said, “Honey, the time has come. Let us have some coffee.”
The boys came out of the back bedroom, tall and shy, in their school uniforms. Caleb and Eli. They had the blue eyes of my husband and the long jaw of my son, and I looked at them and felt the grief of seven weeks and the strange new joy of a woman who has been handed something she did not know she had lost. Eli said, “Miss Loretta, Mister Earl told us you made the best pound cake in Lauderdale County.” I laughed until I cried. I said I would bring one on Sunday. I said they would need winter coats.
The rest took months. Wade told his children and his church. He took the boys to a lawyer and signed the papers that gave them his name, and Denise, after a long and terrible winter, decided to stay and begin again. Tammy Rae went back to school to finish her nursing degree. On the first of every month, Wade sent the money himself, openly, to the account in Tuscumbia. I told him it was not charity. It was his duty. He said, “Yes, Mama,” the way he used to when he was nine years old and had broken a window.
In February I found a folded note in the Bible of Earl, tucked into the book of Ruth. It was written in pencil, in his blocky capital letters. “Sugar, I made a promise I should not have made, and I am sorry I could not break it. Love those boys. They are good. They are ours.” I read it three times. Then I walked to the kitchen and set the table for five. On Sunday at one, the doorbell rang. I opened it, and there they stood, all four of them, Wade and the twins and Tammy Rae, holding a pound cake that was clearly store bought. I took it anyway.