“Plan,” Mom said, and then she stopped, and her hands began to shake in her lap. I took both of them in mine. “What plan, Mama?” She looked at the wall for a while. “He did not say. Crystal told him, ‘Not yet. Wes has to sign first. And the man laughed. He said, ‘Then we will see how steady an old woman is on a wet bathroom floor.” The smell of the tuna casserole turned my stomach. I have welded pipe in sixty mile an hour wind, and I sat on my own couch next to my own mother and could not make my fingers hold still.
I called Mrs. Bigheart at seven that evening, and she came to the house in her own car. She wrote down every word Mom said, slowly, in a green notebook, and she asked three times whether Mom could describe the man. Mom could. Tall, in his fifties, a gold watch, a bad cough, and a car with Kansas plates, the very car I had seen in the driveway when I walked in. Mrs. Bigheart nodded and closed the notebook. “Mr. Tate,” she said, “I do not think we are looking at a woman who rented out a room. I think we are looking at a business.”
She was right. By Friday, the detective, a heavy, patient man named Kincaid, had traced the Kansas plates to a rental car, and the rental car to a man named Garrett Voss of Wichita. Voss had no job that anybody could name. On paper, however, he was the agent for eleven small life insurance policies sold to Oklahoma families in two years. Every one of the policies covered an elderly parent. Every one named the spouse of the policy owner as the beneficiary. Three of those parents had died, and two of the deaths had been written up as falls.
She prayed for five days, and five days is exactly what she was given.
They arrested Garrett Voss on Saturday morning in a motel off Interstate 44, in his socks, with the gold watch still on the nightstand. In the trunk of his car, the police found a binder. It held the names of seven more families, and each page had three columns, headed Room, Pills, and Date. Beside the name of my wife, somebody had written a date three weeks away. Detective Kincaid showed it to me in the hallway of the station. I read the date, sat down on a bench, and did not get up again for a long time.
Crystal turned herself in on Monday with a lawyer at her side. She asked the detective to pass me a message. She said she had only ever wanted the money, that Voss had planned the rest, and that he had promised it would look like old age. “She said she never touched the water on that floor,” Kincaid told me. “I explained that this is not the defense she thinks it is.” I thanked him, and I went outside and stood in the parking lot in the cold, looking at nothing, until my breath stopped shaking.
The policy was voided as a fraud. The signature page I had signed in my kitchen turned out to have been slipped on top of the real application, and the camera in the agency office showed Voss doing it. Crystal pleaded guilty to conspiracy, insurance fraud, and exploitation of an elderly person, and the judge gave her nine years. Voss received fifteen. The judge ordered the thirty one thousand dollars from the rental account frozen and returned, along with the forty thousand dollars my mother had given us, which had been spent on a boat nobody ever saw.
My mother had her hip replaced in November. She came through it like a soldier, complaining only about the hospital pudding. In the rehabilitation center, she had more visitors than the mayor. My whole crew drove in from three states with their hard hats in the back seats. The young couple from Wichita, whom I had helped carry their bags that night, sent a basket of fruit and a letter. “Please tell your mother,” the wife wrote, “that we slept badly in her bed, and we have not stopped thinking of her since.”
I gave up the road that winter. A pipe fabrication shop on the east side of Tulsa needed a lead welder for day shifts, forty hours, no travel, and the owner shook my hand before I finished my sentence. I painted the big bedroom with the bay window the color of butter, because Mom likes butter. I hung her old curtains. I carried the printed sign from the door out to the barbecue pit, and I burned it, and I watched it curl until there was nothing left but a black corner with the word Welcome on it.
On the first warm Saturday in March, I drove her to the fried catfish place in Okmulgee that I had been promising her for six months. She walked in on a cane with her head high and ordered the large plate and a slice of coconut pie. The waitress, who had known her for forty years, came around the counter and wept. Mom patted her arm and told her to stop making a fuss, because the fish was getting cold.
We sat by the window. Mom held her fork over the catfish and looked at me across the table. “Wesley,” she said, “you came home five days early.” I nodded. “Do you know why?” she asked. I shook my head. “Because I prayed for it,” she said. “Every night on that mat. Just five days, Lord. Just five.” She took a bite of fish and chewed it thoughtfully. “He gave me exactly what I asked for,” she said. “He has always been very reasonable that way.”