It was the woman from the buffet. She stood on our porch on Christmas Eve in a thin wool coat and a pair of lace up shoes that were far too light for the cold, leaning on the same cane. Her silver hair was pinned up neatly, as if she had taken great care to look presentable. Behind her at the curb, a taxi idled, its meter still running. She looked at me, and then at Kristen, and then she looked past us, into the hall, where Doug stood frozen with one hand on the mantel. “Dougie,” she said. “I am sorry. I could not stay away. It is Christmas, and I did not want to spend it alone.”
I knew that voice. I did not know it from the casino. I knew it from a wedding in 1998, from a Fourth of July in Gulfport, from a phone call at three in the morning when Doug lost his brother. “Gail,” I said. My knees nearly went. Gail was the wife of Bobby, the younger brother of Doug. He had died four years ago in a VA hospital in Biloxi, of lung disease, and Gail had stood at the graveside in a black hat, and I had held her hand. After the funeral, she had faded out of our lives, the way people sometimes do. I had never once wondered where she went.
Kristen looked from me to her father. “So she is not your girlfriend,” she said, with a small, shaky laugh. “She is Aunt Gail?” Doug nodded. He had aged ten years in the last ten days. “I could not tell you, Joanne,” he said hoarsely. “I did not know how.” I told him to bring her inside, and I helped her out of the thin coat. She was shaking, and not entirely from cold. I put her in the chair by the fire and handed her a cup of cocoa, and she wrapped both hands around it like a child. Then Doug sat on the hearth and began, finally, to tell it.
A woman with silver hair at a casino buffet was not a secret love but a promise made at a hospital bed.
Bobby died owing money, he said. Not to a bank. To a man in Gulfport who lent cash at the kind of rates that ruin lives. Bobby and Gail had both been gambling, quietly, for years, on the boats, and the end of it was a hospital bill, a second mortgage, and a debt of sixty thousand dollars. In the VA room, three days before he passed, Bobby took Doug by the wrist and said, “Do not let them take her house.” Doug had promised. He had not understood what the promise would cost.
“The Mustang paid the man in Gulfport,” Doug said, looking at his hands. “Forty one thousand dollars, in cash, in April. I could not tell you. You remember what you said about Bobby, Joanne, in 2015, when he borrowed the thirty thousand and never paid us back. You said, No more. I heard that. And when Bobby died, I thought, she will say it again about Gail, and I will have to choose between my wife and the widow of my brother.” He lifted his eyes, red and bleary. “I chose to lie. It was the worst decision of my life.”
I sat very still. There was a moment when I could have said everything sharp that I felt, and I felt a great deal. Twenty five years of marriage and eight months of secrets. But I looked at Gail, small and silver and ashamed in my armchair, and I thought of the women at church who had once stood by me when my own mother died. “Doug,” I said, “I did say no more. I said it about a man who borrowed and never thanked us. I never said it about a widow who was drowning. You should have trusted me with that difference.”
Gail was crying into her cocoa. “I have not played in six months,” she whispered. “Not a dollar. Dougie made me promise. But the buffet is where he meets me. It is the one place nobody asks questions. I sit there and watch the people at the machines, and it is like watching a fire from across a river.” I got up, crossed the room, and took her hand. “Gail,” I said, “from now on we do not meet at a casino. We meet at this table. Every Sunday. And you will go to a meeting, and I will drive you.” She looked up at me as if I had handed her a life jacket.
She did go. Gamblers Anonymous met on Thursday nights in a church hall in Hattiesburg, and I drove her there and sat in the car with a thermos and a crossword, because she asked me not to come in. After six weeks, she asked me to come in. By spring she was staying with us in the old room of Kristen, learning to garden, and by summer she had a part time job at a florist. Doug and I sat down with the numbers and a lawyer and made a plan to pay down the rest of the debt of Bobby, two hundred a month, from our own checking account, in the open.
On the first Saturday of June, Kristen came home from school with something on her phone. The Mustang. She had found it on a Facebook page for a car show in Gulfport, a nineteen sixty eight, black, with a new owner, a retired Navy mechanic named Tom. Doug did not want to go. We made him. Tom turned out to be a gentle man with a white mustache, and he took one look at Doug and said, “You sold her, did you not? Get in.” He handed over the keys. Doug sat behind the wheel with both hands on it, and his face did something I will never forget.
We drove that Mustang along the beach road with the windows down, the four of us, Doug and me in front, Kristen and Gail in the back with the wind in their hair. Gail was laughing. Doug reached over without looking and took my hand across the seat, and he held it the whole way to the end of the pier. Somewhere around Biloxi, I realized I had stopped being angry weeks ago, and that I had not noticed when. I think it happens like that. The lie leaves quietly, and in its place comes something quieter and stronger. I do not have a name for it. Doug says it is called Mississippi.
