I stood on that hill with the white roses in my hands, and I asked the cedar what no person could tell me. Then I went down the hill to Broadway, to the Hannibal Flower Mart, because the roses still had a little paper band from the shop. The florist, a round woman named Marla Teague, looked at the band, looked at me and said, “Mrs. Coombs, your husband has had a standing order here for thirty eight years. White roses, every Thursday, paid in cash, delivered to Riverview Cottage on Pearl Street. He asked me never to mention it to anyone, and I never have.”
Riverview Cottage was a small brick home for women with special needs, on a quiet street I had driven down a thousand times without once looking at the sign. I sat in my car outside it for twenty minutes with my hands on the wheel. Forty years of Thursdays, I thought. Cigar smoke and peppermints. Then I smelled the peppermints in my own coat pocket, where Elbert had always left them, and I understood that the smoke had come from a pipe he smoked on the porch there. I got out of the car, straightened my collar and rang the bell like a woman who has lost everything and is about to find something.
A kind director named Mrs. Alvarado led me down a hall to a sunny sitting room. A small woman with silver hair in a braid sat by the window, folding a stack of paper napkins into perfect triangles. She looked up. She had the eyes of Elbert, the exact gray green of a Mississippi River morning. “Are you Winifred?” she asked in a soft, careful voice. “Elbert showed me your picture. He said you were the best biscuit maker in Marion County.” I could not speak. She patted the chair beside hers. “I am Evelyn Rose,” she said. “I am his sister. I am sorry nobody told you.”
A florist standing order and a ledger of Thursday visits led a Hannibal widow to the sister her husband had kept safe in secret for thirty eight years.
I learned it all that afternoon, over weak tea and her napkin triangles. Elbert had a sister six years younger, born in 1951, with a mind that stayed gentle and young. In the nineteen fifties, his parents were ashamed. They sent her to a state hospital in Fulton when she was nine, and told the neighbors she had passed. Elbert found out at nineteen, when he came across a letter from the nurses. He never forgave his father for it. At forty two, in 1987, he finally brought her home to Hannibal, to Riverview Cottage, and he promised her she would never be alone again.
“Why would he hide it from me?” I asked. Evelyn folded another napkin. “He was afraid, Winifred. His mother made him swear on the Bible not to tell, before she passed. And then every year it was harder to start. He said you would think less of him for keeping a secret that big.” She smiled at me, a small and perfect smile. “He told me he loved you so much he was scared to disappoint you. He ordered us a stone together, brother and sister, so I would have a place with the family name. He said I should never be left in a field with no name.”
I sat there in that sunny room and thought of the many Thursday nights I had pressed his shirt and wondered whether to ask him anything. I had been lonely for forty years, and he had been lonelier, hauling a secret like a grain truck up a hill. I was not angry. I tried to be, driving home, but it would not hold. All I felt was a rushing sort of sorrow that I had not been given the chance to love her for thirty eight years. So I called my son Glenn and told him to put the casserole dish in the car. We were going to bring Evelyn a hot supper.
Glenn was shocked, then quiet, then wonderful. He drove us to Riverview that night with his two boys in the back seat, and all of us sat around Evelyn and ate chicken and rice and biscuits at a card table. The grandsons asked if she knew how to play checkers. She said she knew how to win. The next Thursday, I brought my coffee can savings, the whole six thousand two hundred dollars, and gave Mr. Schaefer a change of plans. He took the gray granite order apart and wrote a new one in his careful hand. The double stone on the hill would stay exactly as Elbert had ordered it, brother and sister.
For myself, I picked a small plain stone to stand someday by the gate, next to his mother. And with what money was left, and a loan from the church, I turned the sewing room of my white frame house into a bedroom with a quilt, a night light and a reading chair by the window. Evelyn Rose came home to me on the first of March, with one suitcase and a shoebox of paper napkins. She stepped across the wraparound porch very slowly, took in the river below, and whispered, “Elbert, you did good.” I took her hand. I did not want to let it go.
Glenn also asked about the lodge. We visited the Shriners hall together, and the old secretary told us Elbert had paid his dues every year but had not come to a Thursday meeting since 1987. The men insisted on doing something. They built a ramp at my house and a wide bright bathroom, and a retired carpenter hung a swing on my porch. Not one of them asked why. They only said Elbert was the finest man they ever knew, and now they knew why.
Now every Thursday evening we sit together on the porch, two women with a plate of peppermints between us and a blanket across both our laps. The cardinal comes to the feeder just at dusk, red as a stop sign, and Evelyn names him Elbert every time. I let her. Down on the river, the steamboat whistle sounds, and the lights come on in Mark Twain town, where everybody knows everything and I had to learn the one thing that mattered most at seventy eight. Some secrets are not betrayals at all. They are promises, kept the only way a frightened man knew how.
