“Courthouse,” Mom finished in a small voice, and she held the box of chocolates up to her chest as if it could protect her. “He said it would be a quiet ceremony, just the two of us. A drive in the country, he said. And then a nice lunch.” She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It said ten past two. “Darren,” she said, “he told me he had a ring.” I put my hand over hers. I have hung from a turbine blade by a single rope in a forty mile an hour gust, and my heart has never beaten as it did in that moment.
I called Mrs. Yazzie from the hotel hallway, and she called a Sergeant Delgado of the Amarillo police, and by three oclock the three of us were sitting in the office of the hotel manager, going over a plan on a legal pad. Mom would remain in her room. A female officer in a hotel uniform would stay beside her. At four, when Royce Carver arrived with his flowers and his smile, he would be told that she was waiting upstairs. He would ride the elevator. The sergeant would be waiting on the fourth floor.
I had never been so afraid of a clock. At five minutes to four, I stood in the stairwell with a deputy named Pike, listening to the hum of the elevator cables. The doors opened exactly on the hour. Out stepped a silver haired man of sixty one, in a navy blazer and a bolo tie, with a bouquet of red roses in one hand and a small velvet box in the other. He looked kind. That was the worst part. He looked like every grandfather in every church in Texas.
The real danger was never the lonely heart, only the stranger who came to count it.
“Mr. Carver?” the sergeant said. “I am Sergeant Delgado of the Amarillo police. I would like to talk to you about a woman named Evelyn Pruitt.” For a second, the charming smile stayed on his face. Then something moved behind his eyes, and it was gone. He did not run. He set the roses on the carpet very carefully, as if they might bruise, and held out both wrists. In the velvet box was a gold ring with a small diamond. Inside the band was engraved a date, three weeks away, and the initials R and E.
In the trunk of his car, the police found a suitcase with five wedding rings, each with a different name engraved inside, and a ledger. It listed the names of eleven women, the dates he had met them, the balances of their accounts, and a column headed Time. Three of the women were dead. Two had been moved to nursing homes far from their families. The last entry, in his neat handwriting, was my mother. Her balance, the proceeds of a small farm in Hereford, was ninety four thousand dollars. The Time column was blank.
Kristy confessed on the following Monday. She had met Royce at a church supper in the summer and had fallen for the flattery as easily as a girl. He told her he loved her. He told her she was too young and too clever to waste her life on a man who climbed towers. He promised that once my mother signed over her farm money, he would take Kristy to Mexico. She wept as she told it. The detective said what I was thinking, which was that a person can be a fool and still be responsible.
The court gave Royce Carver nineteen years, and the district attorney in two other counties filed charges of their own. The families of the dead women wrote to me, a stack of letters I still keep in a drawer. Kristy was charged with conspiracy and given three years of probation and a mandatory counseling course. I filed for divorce before the ink on the sentence had dried. I signed my half of the papers at the same kitchen table where she had said, Since August, and I remember the pen was blue.
Mom came home on a Thursday. She walked into the hallway and stopped at the door of her old bedroom with its quilting table and its window over the yard. Someone had put the bed back, the sheets fresh, the quilt she had made in 1989 folded across the foot. A crew of my fellow technicians had spent the weekend scrubbing every surface and hanging a new door on the den. The baby monitor was nowhere to be seen. I had taken it out to the yard, laid it on the gravel, and driven over it twice.
I took a ground job after that, training new climbers at a facility outside Amarillo. I say ground, but there is still a tower there, a short one, and I teach with my feet at the base and my eyes on the sky. I am home every night by six. We eat dinner together at the kitchen table, Mom and I, with a candle and cloth napkins, and afterward, we do the word search in the paper. She wins most nights. She still stays up until midnight, and I let her.
On Sundays, a neighbor named Mr. Alvarado walks over from three doors down with a bouquet from his garden. He is eighty two, a widower, and a retired school bus driver, and he is shy as a boy. He sits with Mom on the porch and talks about tomatoes. She is very careful with him. She asks questions. She asks to see his driver license, once, as a joke. He laughs and hands it over, and I realize with a rush of joy that my mother has her own good sense back, and it is stronger than ever.
