“Carla, freeze it,” I said, standing in the manager office with the phone still warm in my hand. “Every dollar, every account. And please show me that woman again.” She turned the screen so I could see the security image, the woman standing at the teller line with Clyde chin. I looked at her face for a long time, at the way she held her shoulders, high and braced, the way a stray cat holds itself near a door. I was not afraid. That surprised me. I was curious, and under the curiosity, in a place I had not known I kept, I was already a little bit sorry.
I took the old yellow envelope out of the folder, the one postmarked Cairo, Illinois, 1987, and I turned it over. The flap had been torn and taped. The letter inside was two pages in Clyde slow block printing. I sat down in Carla armchair and read it, while Darnell stood in the doorway with his arms folded, and Carla pretended to look at her calendar. “Dear Wanda,” it began. “If you are reading this, I did not have the courage to say it to your face. In June of 1986, in Cairo, there was a woman named Loretta, and I was weak. In March she had a baby girl. I have sent money since, through a lawyer. I am so ashamed.”
There was a second paragraph. I read it twice. “Wanda, I never told you because I was afraid you would leave, and you were the best thing I had. The girl is called Rhonda. She has my chin and her mother stubbornness. If anything happens to me, please do not hate her. She never asked to be born. And if you can find it in your heart, one day, be kind.” I folded it in half and held it against my chest. Forty four years of marriage. I thought, well, Clyde. You could have told me. And then I thought: he left me a letter, and he trusted me with it.
A letter from 1987 finally reached its reader, a half sister walked into the bank, and a nephew took a job on the river.
“Ms. Hobbs,” Carla said, softly, “Travis and the woman went out the front door about ten minutes ago. But the woman did not leave with him. She is sitting in the lobby.” I stood up. I smoothed my skirt, and checked my hair in the window glass, and walked out into the bank with Darnell a step behind me. She was on a vinyl bench by the plant, holding her purse in both hands, dressed in a nurse scrub top, thirty nine years old, with a pale freckled face and Clyde chin. She stood when she saw me. “Mrs. Hobbs,” she said. “My name is Rhonda Gaines. I am so sorry.”
I asked her to sit, and she did, and I sat beside her on the bench with my pocketbook on my knees. “Rhonda, you are Clyde daughter,” I said. “I know that now.” Her eyes went wide. “You knew?” she whispered. “I found out about ten minutes ago,” I said, “from a letter that your cousin Travis got his hands on before I did.” She put her fingers to her mouth. “Travis is not my cousin,” she said. “He called me three weeks ago and said he was your nephew, and that you had cut my father out of the will and would not even speak to me. He said you hated us.”
The lobby of the Jefferson Street bank grew very quiet. I put my hand on her wrist. “Honey, I did not know you existed until this afternoon,” I said. “I do not hate you. I did not hate anybody. I cut the crusts off sandwiches for a nine year old boy for twenty nine years, and that boy lied to you, and to me.” Rhonda began to cry, openly, with her shoulders going. Darnell took a clean white handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it to her without a word. “Mrs. Hobbs, he gave me five thousand dollars to come here,” she said. “I am a nurse. I should have known better.”
Travis was picked up that afternoon, outside the Fountain Avenue Methodist parking lot, by two Paducah police officers. He had the power of attorney in his pocket, the pawn shop notary stamp, and a one way bus ticket to Nashville. I did not go to the station. I called the district attorney from my kitchen and asked to speak to the judge, and I said that I would not oppose a plea, as long as it included one thing. Travis would not go to a jail. He would serve his sentence on the water. The judge, an old river man, looked at the file and said that he would see what he could do.
Captain Dewey Pruitt, who had been Clyde pilot on the Mississippi for twenty years, took Travis on as a deckhand, for a year, under probation, at minimum wage. Fourteen hours on, ten off, in January, on a towboat pushing twenty barges of coal south from Paducah. He came home in November with his hands in ruins and his beard grown. He stood on my porch and said, “Aunt Wanda, I am sorry,” and then he said it again. I let him in. I fed him a patty melt, cut corner to corner, and he ate it in silence, with his eyes shut, like a boy of nine.
Rhonda came to dinner on the first Sunday of every month. She brought her two little girls, Clyde granddaughters, who called me Miss Wanda and climbed on my lap like it had been done every week of their lives. I showed them the Bible, the nightstand, Psalms and Proverbs, and the picture of Clyde in his captain hat at the rail of the towboat. “That is your grandfather,” I said. The older one touched the glass. “He has our chin,” she said, and Rhonda laughed, and cried, and I did too.
The following Wednesday I took Rhonda to the grill on Broadway. Eight red stools, a pie case nobody has updated since Carter. We took the third and fourth stools from the end. Darnell hummed gospel at the flat top and set two patty melts in front of us, each one cut corner to corner. Rhonda looked down at hers, then at me. “Mrs. Hobbs, how did he know?” she asked. I took a bite, and chewed, and smiled. “Honey, he asked,” I said. “Darnell is the only man in Paducah who ever asked what I wanted.”
