The woman in the photograph beside the bed, with her hand resting lightly on the shoulder of my young husband, was Loretta Pike, who had sat in the pew behind me at First Baptist for thirty years. She was the woman who passed me the peppermints. She was the woman who brought a coconut pie to every funeral. I stood in the doorway of the little room in Unit 217 with the key ring still dangling from my fingers, and the world turned quietly upside down. Mr. Salinas, behind me, did not say a word.
I walked in. I could not help it. I sat down in the recliner, which smelled faintly of the aftershave of my husband, and I looked around at the walls of photographs. School plays, a first communion, a high school graduation in a blue gown. In every picture, a girl with long brown hair and green eyes. On the back of each, in the handwriting of Russell, the same date and the same two words. To Daddy. Under the lamp was a notebook, and in the notebook, a letter addressed to me in a hand I knew.
Dear Deanna, it began. If you are reading this, I am gone, and you have found what I could not tell you. I have a daughter. Her name is Marisol.
She was born in 1984, two years before I met you, to a girl named Loretta whom I had loved and lost in a foolish quarrel. I did not know about the baby until 1999, when Loretta wrote to me, ill and frightened. By then I was your husband, and I was afraid. So I rented this little room, and I visited on Sundays after my route, and I told you I was at the truck stop.
Some secrets are not betrayals but confessions that were too heavy to carry across a kitchen table.
I read the letter to the end with tears running down my chin. Russell wrote that he had loved me without ceasing. He wrote that he had never touched Loretta again, that the room was only for the girl, a place to give her gifts and listen to her tell about school. He wrote that his greatest sorrow was that he had not trusted me enough to say it aloud. He wrote that I would have been kind. He asked me, if I could, to forgive him, and to be kind to Marisol, who had done no wrong.
I sat in that recliner for an hour. I thought of the Sunday mornings in the pew, of the quiet hands of Loretta, of the casserole she brought when Russell died. She had stood beside me at his grave, in a black hat, weeping harder than anyone. I had thought it only good manners. I had not known that she was weeping for the father of her daughter. And I had not known that, for two years after the funeral, she had mailed the money orders to this unit from Lawton, so that the room would stay.
Marisol was waiting for me outside, leaning against her car in the hot sun, in her nurse scrubs. She had come to see what became of the belongings of her mother. When she saw me come out of the unit with the letter in my hand, she straightened. “Mrs. Ricks,” she said, in a voice that wavered. “I am so sorry. I did not know how to tell you. My mother wanted to, for years, and could not. She said you were the finest woman in the church.”
I looked at her face. It was the face of my husband, softened, with his green eyes and his stubborn chin. I felt a hundred things in a minute, hurt and anger and loss and a kind of wonder, and under them all, something that surprised me. I opened my arms. She stepped into them like a child. We stood in the parking lot of a storage place in Wichita Falls, two women who had both loved Russell Ricks, and we held on to each other for a long time.
I had the contents of the unit moved to my home. The recliner went in the den. The photographs went into an album that I keep on the coffee table, and the girl in the pictures became, over the next year, a woman at my kitchen table on Sunday afternoons, helping me with the crossword. She calls me Deanna now. She brought the ashes of her mother to the church in the spring, and we buried them together, under the old oak, with a coconut pie.
On the headstone of Loretta, I chose the words myself. They read, Beloved mother, faithful friend. And at the bottom, in smaller letters, below her name, I had them carve one more line, because a man I loved had asked me to be kind. It says, You were never alone in this pew. Marisol read it for a long time. Then she took my hand, and we walked back to the car, and she drove us home with the windows down.