I read the message twice at the kitchen table of my little house at the back of the Shady Hollow park, and then I read it a third time with my glasses pushed up on my head. For my girl. She knows what this is for. C. The donation had come through under the name of my husband, a thousand dollars, at four in the morning, from a bank in Harrison, Arkansas. Clyde passed in 2016. I have stood at his stone on the hill a hundred times. A man at rest does not give a thousand dollars. But somebody who knew his name, and the way he signed himself, did.
I called the bank in Harrison. A girl there said she could not tell me who had made the payment. I asked if she could tell me whether a Cecil Pruitt had an account at her branch. She went quiet. Cecil is my brother in law, eighty three years old, a retired mail carrier who has not spoken to my son Travis since a quarrel over a truck in 2019. He signs everything with one letter. He always did. And when I called him, he picked up on the first ring and said, in his gravel voice, “Nadine, I wondered when you would telephone.”
Cecil told me about the account. Clyde had opened it in 1983, in the Ozark Mountain Bank, with a joint owner named Nadine Pruitt, and he had put in twenty dollars from every paycheck for thirty three years. Clyde never told me, because he wanted it to be a surprise for our fiftieth anniversary. He passed before the fortieth. The account had grown to two hundred twelve thousand dollars, and a letter from the bank had gone, by mistake, to Travis as the next of kin. Travis had found it in January. And he and Brandy had been planning ever since to get it.
A donation from a name that should not exist gave one RV park owner the length of a single afternoon to bring her son back to the truth in Branson.
I gave my terms to Cecil over the telephone. I asked him to drive to Branson that same afternoon, in his old pickup, with the bank statements, and to sit with me on my porch. And I called Travis and Brandy, and told them I wished to see them at five o clock sharp, and that there was no sense in them calling the sheriff, because I had already done it. Travis said, “Mom, you are being dramatic.” I said I was seventy six years old and had earned it. Then I put on a pot of coffee and set out four cups, one for each of the people who had lied to me.
They came in the white Tahoe, with a plate of store bought brownies. Brandy did the talking. She said the fundraiser was only a way to cover the cost of the paperwork, that the medical bills were real in a sense, that Nadine was getting older and it would be easier to manage the money in a joint account with her children. Cecil, in the corner chair, said, “Brandy, you set up a page for a woman who is not sick.” Travis folded. He said he had lost money on a fishing resort in Table Rock, and that he and Brandy had been drowning. “Mom, I just wanted to borrow it,” he said. “I would have told you.”
I laid the bank letter on the table, and the printed page from the fundraiser, and the account statement. Brandy snatched the bank letter, meaning to carry it to the Tahoe and drive off before the sheriff arrived, and she strode out through my screen door and down the porch steps in her white sandals. She stopped at the bottom. Down the gravel lane, from one end of Shady Hollow to the other, the residents of the RV park had pulled their golf carts across the road in a long, polite line, with a lawn chair beside every one.
There were thirty seven of them, retired truckers and school bus drivers and church ladies, with thermoses of coffee. Mr. Haskell from lot nine lifted his visor and said, “Mrs. Pruitt says to wait.” Brandy stood in the road with the letter in her hand. Nobody shouted. Nobody threatened. They simply sat, as the people of a small park have always sat when one of their own has been wronged, and they looked at her until she turned, and walked back up the steps, and laid the letter on my table.
The sheriff took a report and a statement, and the prosecutor, a kind young woman, did not press charges, because I asked her not to. Travis and Brandy refunded every one of the two hundred eleven donors, fourteen thousand three hundred dollars, by mail, with a note of apology. They sold the fishing resort for a loss and moved to a rental in Springfield. I put the two hundred twelve thousand dollars in a new account at Ozark Mountain Bank, in my name, and I kept thirty thousand dollars for myself. It was the most money I had ever held. I put it in the freezer for a week and then took it out.
In the name of Clyde, who passed in 2016, I started the Clyde Pruitt Fund. It pays for real medical bills, prescriptions and dental care for retired workers and RV park residents who cannot afford them, in Taney, Stone and Christian counties. In the first year we paid five hundred eight bills. A woman in lot fourteen, eighty one years old, got her first pair of hearing aids and sat on her step for an hour listening to the cicadas. She told me she had forgotten they made such a racket. I told her I thought it was the most beautiful racket in Missouri.
Cecil lives in the spare room now, and he and I sit on the porch every evening and watch the sunset over the pond. Travis comes on Saturdays, alone, and fixes whatever has broken. Last week he brought a bag of tomatoes and a framed picture of his father in a straw hat, holding up a bass. He set it on the shelf without a word. Cecil looked at it, and then at me, and said, “Girl, he would have been the one to say it was a good day.” I said he would have. I said he always did.
