Delbert Cobb. I said the name aloud in my the kitchen of my mother, and it sounded like a word in a foreign language, because for twenty two years I had called him Dad. He had walked me down the aisle at my wedding, when my own father had been dead for years. He had taught my daughter to fish. My mother put the note down on the table and folded her hands, and in a voice so calm it frightened me, she said, “Cindy, I have not spoken that name in forty five years. I have been waiting for someone to say it first.”
She told me then, in pieces, with long pauses, while the clock on the wall ticked. The twenty second of July, 1979. A Sunday. Eleven at night, in the lot behind the truck stop, on her way to her car. A man grabbed her from behind. She fought. She was four months pregnant with me, with the child of my father Jimmy, who was on a boat in the Gulf. She thought she would die. A woman was screaming from the back door, and the man ran, and she saw his face in the light from the kitchen. She never told anyone who it was, because nobody had believed her the first time.
“I went to the police,” Mama said. “A young officer took my statement. Ronnie Cobb. He wrote it all down and told me they would look into it. Then he came to my apartment two days later and said the report was lost and I should drop it. He was the cousin of Delbert. I did not know that then. I only knew he had a new truck.” She looked at the dress, lying in its bag on the chair. “And Brenda, who saw it, who was going to marry that man in September, vanished in August. I thought he had killed her.”
A secret locked in the dark is only waiting for the bill to go unpaid and the right hands to open the door.
It took us three days to find her. The sister of Brenda, an eighty year old woman named Ruth in Van Buren, opened the door a crack, and when I said the name of her sister she began to shake. “She sends a card every Christmas,” she whispered. “Just the word love, and a B. No return address. Postmark Bakersfield.” I called the police department in Bakersfield. A sergeant with a patient voice agreed to drive to the only retired nurse in that city named Brenda who had no past before 1980. She called me back that evening. “Ms. Akers,” she said, “I have someone here who would like to speak with you.”
The voice on the telephone was old and cracked and unmistakable. “Is this the daughter of Darlene?” it said. “Is it the baby?” I could not speak. I sat on the kitchen floor of my mother with the phone against my ear and nodded, over and over, as if she could see. “I am so sorry,” said Brenda Ford. “I saw him. I saw his face. I was twenty four and I had a ring on my finger and I was so afraid. I ran. I have run for forty five years. I will come to Arkansas. Tell your mother I will come.”
She flew into Fort Smith on a Thursday in a blue cardigan, a thin, upright woman of sixty eight with short white hair, carrying a small suitcase. My mother stood on the front step of her house in Alma. For a long moment neither of them moved. Then Mama walked down the path and put her arms around her old friend, and the two of them rocked back and forth on the grass, holding each other like girls. I stood on the porch with my hand over my mouth. A neighbor stopped his lawn mower to watch, and then, quietly, turned it off.
At the kitchen table, Brenda told us everything. She had seen Delbert in the parking lot. She had followed him home. When she confronted him, he promised her it would never happen again, and in the same breath told her that his cousin on the force would see that she regretted going to the police. She took his checkbook from the dresser the night she left. She rented a unit on Rogers Avenue in his name, put the dress inside with a copy of the report she had taken from the desk of the cousin, and set up an automatic payment from his own account. “I used his money to hold his secret,” she said. “I figured one day he would stop paying, and someone would open it.”
Delbert Cobb had died eighteen months before, in a nursing home in Fort Smith, of the dementia that had taken the last four years of his mind. The bank closed his accounts. The payments stopped. The auction followed. I did the arithmetic on a napkin, sitting in my truck outside the house of my mother. If he had lived a year longer, the dress would have stayed in the dark. A man who did a terrible thing and could not remember it had finally let go of the thing that was bought to hide it, and a woman with a flashlight had come in through the door.
I told Rick that night. I sat him down at our kitchen table and I told him all of it, with the dress laid over the back of a chair. He said nothing for a long time. Then he put his face in his hands. “I knew he was a hard man,” he said. “I never knew that.” He did the thing I will love him for until I die: he did not defend his father. He asked, “What do we do?” In the end, he signed over his entire inheritance from the estate of Delbert to a shelter for women in Fort Smith. They named the new wing Darlene House.
In October, in the backyard of my mother, under the pecan tree, Brenda Ford was married to Lorraine Pike, her partner of thirty one years, who had flown in from Bakersfield with a bouquet of white roses. Brenda wore the dress. A seamstress in Van Buren had taken in the waist and let down the hem and washed away the dust of forty five years. The long sleeves, the high lace collar, the ivory silk. My mother stood beside her, in her good navy suit, with a rose in her hand. When Brenda turned to the guests, she was smiling the way a woman smiles when she has finally come home.
