The old man in Room 114 held the photograph in both of his shaking hands, and his thumb moved across the face of the baby. “That is your brother Curtis,” he said. “Born in the spring of nineteen sixty two, in a hospital in Sweetwater, to a nineteen year old girl named Velma Dobbs and a boy named Thomas Ledbetter who was on a train to basic training and did not know.” I am Darlene Kidd, sixty one years old, and I sat down on the edge of his bed because my knees would not hold me. “Sir,” I whispered, “are you telling me that you are the father of my brother?”
He told me everything in a voice like dry paper. Thomas Ledbetter went to Vietnam in 1965 and came home in 1967 with a Purple Heart and a shattered hip. Velma was already married to my father, Hollis Kidd, a lineman who had adopted Curtis the day he was born and loved him like his own. Thomas never asked for a thing. He moved to Abilene and worked at a feed mill until his hip gave out. In 1993, a friend from church saw his name on a nursing home list and told Mama. She drove forty miles the very next Tuesday, and she did not miss one for thirty one years.
The aide who had brought me down the hall, a young woman named Keisha, stood in the doorway wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Miss Darlene,” she said, “your mother brought him a pecan pie every Tuesday. She did the crossword with him. She trimmed his mustache.” Thomas reached into the blanket and pulled out a stack of Tuesday crosswords held by a rubber band, thirty one years of them, every one filled in with two different handwritings. “Your daddy knew,” he said. “Hollis came here once and shook my hand. He said, “She is a good woman, and so are you.””
A stack of Tuesday crosswords gave one daughter the length of an afternoon to bring her brother back to the truth in Sweetwater.
Thomas gave his terms from the wheelchair in a voice that was weak but absolutely clear. “Darlene, your mother left me six hundred twelve thousand dollars, and I have no use for it at eighty nine. Here is what I want. A third goes to the aides who have cared for me, who earn eleven dollars an hour. A third goes to a fund in the name of your mother for the lonely old men in these homes. And a third goes to Curtis, on one condition. He comes to see me. Just once. I would like to look at his face.”
Curtis arrived at ten past noon, because I had called him from the parking lot. He stood in the doorway in his rumpled sport coat, smelling of last night, and looked at the old man for a long time. “I contested that will,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I told the whole town Mama was a cheat.” He crossed the room and sank into the chair. “I owe a man in Odessa eighty thousand dollars. I have been a drunk for twenty years, and I blamed Daddy and then Mama and then everybody else. I thought she was hiding something. She was hiding the best thing she ever did.”
Then fear got the better of him. Curtis grabbed the photograph and the bundle of crosswords off the blanket, mumbled that he could not do this, and bolted into the hall toward the exit sign. He did not get thirty feet. Keisha stepped into the corridor and rolled a laundry cart across the passage. A tall orderly named Marcus stood in front of the double doors. An old woman with a walker, a resident of the wing, set her walker sideways in the way and said, in a voice of iron, “Young man, you put that back.”
Curtis stopped with the photograph crumpled in his fist. He stood in the middle of the hall, sixty four years old, with the whole wing watching him through doorways, and I saw his face turn into the face of the baby in the picture. He walked back slowly. He smoothed the photograph against his chest, knelt beside the wheelchair, and placed it in the old hands. “Sir,” he said, “I am Curtis.” Thomas touched his cheek with one bent finger. “You have the eyes of your mother,” he said. “I would know them anywhere.”
The consequences were small and holy. Curtis stopped drinking that week, with the help of a VA chaplain, and he drove to Abilene every Tuesday with a pecan pie and the crossword. He paid the man in Odessa with his share and sold the truck lot to a cousin. Each of the aides received a bonus of two thousand dollars. When Thomas passed in his sleep the following spring, Curtis was holding his hand, and the old man was wearing a new shirt that Curtis had bought him, buttoned to the very top.
In the name of my mother Velma, who passed in July, I started the Velma Kidd Fund. It pays for Tuesday visitors and companions for lonely veterans in nursing homes, and for a pecan pie on every birthday, in Nolan, Taylor and Mitchell counties. In the first year we trained eighty one volunteers and sat with three hundred and forty residents. One was a ninety four year old widower from Colorado City who had not had a visitor since 2009, and who asked the volunteer, a teenage girl, whether she knew how to do a crossword.
On a Tuesday in October, I drove the old Buick to Abilene with Curtis in the passenger seat and a pecan pie on his lap. The turbines turned slowly on the ridges. At the nursing home, a new resident sat alone by the window in Room 120, with a blanket on his knees. Curtis stopped in the doorway, took a breath, and knocked on the frame. “Sir,” he said, “my mother used to visit on Tuesdays. I thought I might sit with you a while.” The old man looked up, and Curtis sat down, and cut the pie.