The name on the tag of the suitcase in room 214 was Dolores Pettigrew, and I knew the handwriting before I read the letters. I am Patsy Whitlock, sixty seven years old, of Meridian, Mississippi, and I stood in the doorway of the finest hotel I had ever seen, holding a plastic key card in one hand and the handle of my own overnight bag in the other. The suitcase was blue, with a red ribbon tied to the handle, the very ribbon I had tied there at Christmas when I gave it to my baby sister Dee. My baby sister. I let the bag drop.
The room was lovely. White curtains lifted in the breeze from the bay, and a bottle of champagne sat in a silver bucket on the table, beside a bowl of strawberries. On the bed lay a silk robe that I had never seen, and on the night table stood a small framed photograph of Dee and my husband Jim, laughing on a pier, with his arm around her waist. A date was written on the back in her round handwriting. August 2022. I sat down slowly on the bench at the foot of the bed.
Behind me in the corridor, I heard the elevator chime. The steps of Jim came down the hall, quick and nervous. “Patsy, honey, I tried to tell you,” he said, as he came through the door. “It is nothing. The desk clerk made a mistake.” Then he saw the suitcase and the photograph, and his voice stopped short in his throat. At the same instant, the bathroom door opened, and my sister Dee walked out in a hotel towel, with her hair wet, and she looked at me and Jim and screamed.
A smiling desk clerk who said welcome back gave one retired wife the length of an elevator ride to bring her husband back to the truth in Point Clear.
I gave my terms from the bench at the end of the bed, in my traveling dress, with my hands folded on my knees. “Jim, you will sit in that chair. Dee, you will put on some clothes and sit in the other. You will both tell me every date and every dollar. I paid for this room, and I shall have the truth for it. Then I will go downstairs and order dinner for one, and tomorrow morning I will call my lawyer. It is our forty fifth anniversary, and I believe I deserve a story.”
Dee dropped onto the edge of the chair, clutching the towel. “Patsy, it started at the service for Mama,” she said, in a whisper. “Jim drove me home, and we were both so sad, and it became a habit. Four times a year, in Point Clear, while you thought he was at his conferences. I know it was wicked. I told myself I would end it every time.” She wept. Jim stared at the carpet. “It was my idea to bring you here,” he finally said, thickly. “I thought if you saw it, you would understand how foolish I was.”
But Jim could not stand the thought of the lawyer. He suddenly lunged for the folder on the dresser, the one that held the printed hotel receipts for four years, snatched it up, and ran out through the door into the corridor, meaning to take the stairs and throw them into the bay. His shoes pounded on the carpet. At the end of the hall stood the old bellman, Mr. Thibodeaux, with a luggage cart. Two hotel security officers appeared at the stairwell. And my niece came out of the elevator.
Jim stopped in the long corridor beneath the crystal chandelier, with the folder crushed to his chest, a seventy year old bellman with a luggage cart, and two security men barring the stairwell. His daughter, my niece Lacey, stood by the elevator with her purse in her hand and a stricken face. “Daddy,” she said, “Mama called me this morning. I came as fast as I could. Please stop.” Jim looked at his daughter. His legs gave out, and he slid down the wall, and the folder fell open on the carpet.
The consequences were quiet and complete. I filed for divorce in Meridian the following Monday, and the house, which was in my name from my mother, remained mine. Jim moved to an apartment in Tupelo. Dee moved to Texas, and for a year, I did not speak to her. Then she sent me a letter, six pages long, in her round handwriting, and I read it three times on my porch. I did not reply to it, but I did not burn it either. I put it in the drawer where I keep my mother recipes.
In the name of my mother Hazel, who passed in 2016, I started the Hazel Whitlock Fund. It pays for legal help and short hotel stays for women leaving unfaithful or controlling husbands and for anniversary dinners for widows and widowers, in Lauderdale, Neshoba and Kemper counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and four women start over and served six hundred dinners. One was a sixty eight year old retired nurse from Philadelphia who sat in a hotel room, looked at the clean white bed, and said it was the first quiet night in forty years.
On a mild evening in May, on my forty sixth wedding anniversary that was not, I sat on the long porch of the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, in a white rocker, with a glass of champagne in my hand. Beside me sat my daughters Laurel and Janie, and my niece Lacey, laughing, with the bay glittering gold behind the live oaks. A waiter set down a plate of strawberries and a small card that read Happy Anniversary from the staff, which made me laugh out loud. Laurel lifted her glass. “To Mama,” she said, “and to room 214.” I looked at the bay, and for the first time in a year, my heart was light.
