“Her name is Lena,” Viola said, lowering herself onto the sofa. “She is the niece of Booker. the daughter of Calvin.” I had met Calvin once, at our wedding, a thin, nervous man with the eyes of Booker. “The younger brother of your husband was my husband,” Viola said. “In April of 1994 he drove home from a juke joint near Vidalia, and he took the bridge too fast with our six year old in the back seat. She was hurt badly. She has not walked since. Calvin left Natchez a month later and never came back. He could not stand to look at her.” I held my purse in both hands.
“Booker came the very next morning,” Viola said. “He sat by her hospital bed for three days. He said, Viola, my brother ran, but I am not going to.” I thought back to April 1994. Booker had said he was going to a postal conference in Memphis. I remembered his suitcase and his tired face when he got home. “Why did he never tell me?” I asked. Viola looked at me with great gentleness. “Because Calvin was your husband only brother, Claudette, and Booker could not bear for you to think of his family as the kind that runs. He would rather carry it alone.”
The front door creaked, and a young voice called out, “Aunt Vi, I got the mail.” A woman in her late thirties rolled into the room in a lightweight chair, with a stack of envelopes on her lap and reading glasses on a chain, just like that of her mother. She looked at me, and she knew. “You are Aunt Claudette,” she said. “Uncle Booker told me about you every first of the month.” She held out a small, worn tin. “I have something I have been saving for you, if you ever came.”
A tin of monthly letters from Natchez showed a Mississippi widow the quiet loyalty behind her husband six hundred dollar checks, and gave her a niece to love.
Inside the tin was a stack of cards, one for every month, each in the plain hand of a child who had grown up. Lena had written to Uncle Booker since she was seven. And he had answered, every single time, on the same lined paper he used for his bank statements. He had kept a copy of each letter. They told me how he had sat at the kitchen table at night, long after I had gone to bed, writing to a little girl about spelling tests and Easter hats. Her first line, age seven, said, “Dear Uncle Booker, thank you for the money, but I would rather have a visit.”
“He came every Memorial Day weekend,” Lena said, smiling at my confused face. “He told you it was a church retreat.” I put my hand on my chest. “The retreat. Of course. He came home with a sunburn.” We laughed, three women crying over a clumsy secret. Lena told me he had been in the front row when she graduated from Alcorn State, in the only suit he owned. She became a reading specialist and taught children in Natchez for fifteen years. “I teach the ones who are told they cannot read,” she said. “He used to say his wife taught a thousand. I have a lot to live up to.”
We talked until dark. I learned that the check on the first of the month was never for luxuries. It had paid for surgeries, a ramp, a van with a lift, and a house where a girl and her mother could live on their own. It had also cost us a new air conditioner in 2011, and the box fans in the long July, and a good many silent evenings. Strangely, I did not resent a single penny. I felt as if I had been sleeping beside a stranger for fifty two years and was only now introduced to the best of him.
On the drive home I stopped at the bluff and looked over the river for a long time. I thought of the carbon copy in his pocket. Last one. I am sorry, V. He had not been apologizing for the money. He had been apologizing for not being able to keep it going. Before I started the car, I made a promise out loud. In the morning I called my bank, and I set up a payment of six hundred dollars on the first of every month, and I made the memo line read, From your Aunt Claudette.
Lena came up for dinner a month later, and we cooked favorite smothered chicken together, her chair at the stove and my apron on. She told me about the children she tutored, a boy named Marcus who finally read a whole page aloud, and her eyes lit exactly the way that of my husband did when someone told him a good joke. I realized I had not heard that laugh in the house since the service. It was now coming out of her mouth, in my own kitchen, and I closed my eyes and let it fill the room the way he never could.
Viola passed me a recipe card before they left, yellowed and soft as cloth, in square handwriting. It was peach cobbler, and it ended with a line he had added many years later. Make it for the ones you love, and do not wait. I made it the next Sunday for the whole church after the service, and I told the story out loud, all of it, at the long table. The women of the congregation cried and the deacons cleared their throats. Nobody called him anything but a good man, and I agreed, and I meant it.
Simone drove me down for the next Memorial Day, and we brought Lena and Viola home to Jackson for the whole weekend. The ramp we built last spring fits the front porch perfectly. In the evenings Lena reads aloud, her voice rising and falling over the squeak of the swing, and I sit beside her with my iced tea and my Easter hat in my lap. A new air conditioner hums quietly in the window. I am cool, I am surrounded by family, and I finally know every line of my husband.
