kept quiet to protect your mother?” The man was Dr. Martin Haskins, the grandson of old Mr. Haskins, and the face on every Haskins Children Clinic billboard from Lexington to Louisville. Duke sat frozen with his red cup halfway to his mouth. Dr. Haskins kept hold of my hand and spoke to the whole lane. “My grandfather told me this story the winter before he passed away. He asked me to find this family and say thank you, and he asked me to say it gently. Mrs. Faye wrote me when she was ready.”
Everyone had stopped chewing. “In August of 1979,” Dr. Haskins said, “my grandfather was nearly hit by a pickup on Highway 60. It was driven by Opal Pruitt, your aunt, Duke, and you know why she was flying. Your baby sister Lila had a fever of one hundred and five, and your mother was racing her to the hospital in Winchester. She never saw an old man in the road. She only felt the wind of him.” A long breath went around the picnic tables. Herschel lowered himself into his lawn chair and covered his eyes with his hand.
“Roy saw the truck, and Duke saw it too,” Dr. Haskins went on. “Duke was sixteen. He knew it was his mother, and he knew she was terrified, and that night he told the sheriff he saw nothing. He lied to keep a frightened woman from being hauled away from her sick baby. My grandfather found out two days later, at that same hospital, sitting beside Opal while she cried. He told her no harm was done and to take care of her daughter. Then he quietly paid the bill, because the family had no insurance.” I could see Roy so clearly then, standing in the road with his arm around that old man.
A secret kept for forty years out of love for a mother came out at last, and a family forgave each other.
I looked at my nephew. Duke had taken off his sunglasses, and his big car salesman voice was gone. “I was a kid, Aunt Faye,” he said. “I figured if Uncle Roy knew, he would tell the sheriff, and Mama would lose Lila. I never could say it out loud. Then Uncle Roy stopped speaking to me, and I let him.” I shook my head slowly. “Duke, Roy was not angry about the truck. He was hurt that you did not trust him. If you had come to him, he would have driven you both to that hospital himself.”
Dr. Haskins smiled kindly. “My grandfather told me Roy never said a word against the boy. He told me Roy only said that Duke had a good heart and a heavy secret. He asked me to remind everybody that nobody was hurt, and that every one of those choices was made out of love.” Duke put his hand over his mouth. He was fifty three years old, and he looked sixteen again, standing in the sun behind a pile of watermelons, trying to be brave for his mother.
From the back of the crowd, a woman in a nurse uniform stepped forward holding a paper plate. Lila, the baby sister of Duke, forty six years old, a pediatric nurse at the Haskins Clinic. She had come to the reunion straight from a night shift. “Mama told me everything before she passed away,” Lila said softly. “She said there was an old man who forgave her, and a boy who lied for her. Duke, I have been trying to find a way to thank you for thirty years.” Duke stood, and his sister walked into his arms, and the two of them cried like children right in front of the deviled eggs.
Herschel got up next, leaning on his cane, and came to me with his hat in his hands. “Faye, I owe you ten thousand dollars from 1978, and an apology for every year I did not say thank you.” I patted his arm. “Herschel, I forgave that money before you finished asking. But you can pay it back by sitting next to your son at supper tonight.” He laughed, a short wet laugh, and nodded. Then my sister Bernice, who had been choking on pie, laid her fork down and said, “Faye, how much did you really sell it for?”
I told them, and I will not forget the silence. Then I told them the rest. “Sixty years in the produce business, and I kept the Buick because Roy picked it out. But I have a plan, and Dr. Haskins is part of it.” I turned to him. “Martin, there is a corner of the clinic that has no name yet. I would like it to be the Opal Pruitt Fever Ward, for any baby whose family cannot pay.” Dr. Haskins took off his jacket sleeve, wiped his eyes, and said his grandfather would have wanted nothing better. The little ones ran in circles with sparklers, and the grown folks finally stopped keeping score.
We ate until the sun went down behind Pebble Ridge Road. Dr. Haskins stayed for fried chicken, and the children climbed all over his fancy car, and nobody told them to get off. Duke sat beside his father on a bale of straw. Herschel put an arm around his shoulders, the first time, I think, in forty years, and neither of them said a word. Somebody started a guitar, and my sister Bernice sang Amazing Grace loud and off key, and for once nobody laughed at her. Somewhere behind us, the evening crickets had started up, as they do over that old gravel lane in July.
Mr. Bell drove me home that night, slowly, with the window cracked. I told him about Roy and the old man and the fever and the boy who kept a secret out of love. He listened the way he always does. When we turned in at my gate, I looked at the Buick in the carport, its paint faded but its engine humming under the porch light. I said, “Mr. Bell, I think we will keep it another twenty years.” He smiled in the mirror and said, “Yes, Mrs. Faye. And I will be driving it.”
