Part 3 — Papers On The Bed
“Wade, the woman you just married asked me to put my name on a paper that would have given her the house, my pension, and the right to decide who looked after me,” Ronnie said from the screen. His voice was low and hoarse, but every word came through. “Brooke put the pen in my fingers. I could not hold it. It fell on the floor, and she picked it up and put it back, and I let it fall again.”
The barn was as quiet as a church. On the screen my husband breathed through his tube, and his Crimson Tide cap sat crooked on his bald head. “I want you to know I did not sign,” he said. “I could not lift my arm. And I am glad I could not.” Wade had both hands flat on the table now, with white knuckles. He did not look at his bride. He looked at his own boots.
Brooke lunged for the laptop again, and the DJ held her wrist. Her mother called out something sharp. But Ellen Mayfield, the hospice chaplain, stood beside the machine with her hands folded and said in her soft voice, “This is the wish of Mr. Pruett. He asked me to play it only after the toasts were said and the cake was cut, so that nobody could say I had spoiled the day. I waited for the cake.” A few people laughed in spite of themselves.
The law was already on its way. The district attorney of Lauderdale County had the video, the statement of Ellen as a witness, and the visit records of the hospice nurses with the date of March 9th written in black ink. Trying to get a signature from a person who is too ill to understand is a crime in Alabama, whether or not the pen ever touches the paper. Two deputies had been standing at the back of the barn since the toasts, and nobody had noticed them in the dim light.
Brooke did not make the scene I expected. She stood up with her train gathered in one fist, and when the deputy said her name, she looked at Wade for help. He gave her nothing. She walked out through the barn doors in her $4,800 dress, holding the hem up out of the gravel, with her mother trailing behind her and saying the word wedding over and over like a prayer.
Wade came to my folding table, six feet from the ladies room, and knelt on the barn floor in his rented tuxedo. He could not speak at first. Then he said, “Mom, I took it. I took the bonds out of the envelope of Daddy and I signed your name.” He put a cashier check on the table for what was left of the $27,400 and a second envelope that was empty. Underneath it, wrapped in a bath towel from the trunk of his car, was the deer rifle of his father.
I did not scream. I did not say anything for a while. I looked at my son, who had visited his dying father only twice, and I understood the thing Ronnie had understood from his bed, which was that Wade had not been wicked as much as weak. Weakness, left alone, can do almost as much harm. A dying man had spent his last strength not on revenge but on making sure his wife would be told the truth by someone who loved her.
Wade pleaded guilty in August to forgery and theft. The judge gave him probation and ordered him to repay every cent he had spent, and he sold his truck the same week to begin. Brooke was convicted of attempted exploitation of a vulnerable adult and sentenced to jail time and probation. The marriage was annulled in October on grounds of fraud, in a courthouse where the clerk behind the counter turned out to be a girl I had fed hot lunches in 1998.
After the barn cleared out, Ellen Mayfield sat with me at the long table and told me there was one more minute of the recording that Ronnie had asked her to play only for me. We played it at my kitchen table that night, after the dishes. He looked straight at the camera, with his cap on. “Wan,” he said, “the money is only money. Forgive the boy when he comes home with his hat in his hand. Make sure he eats. And thank you for every payday.”
I played it twice more before I could stop. Then I closed the laptop and put my forehead on the cool wood of the table. It was the first time in months that I felt my husband was sitting in the room. I could almost smell the Old Spice and the forklift grease.
Wade comes to Sunday supper now. He sits in the chair that used to be his father, and I make him eat his greens. He does not say much. He washes the dishes without being asked. Last week I caught him looking at the picture of Ronnie on the refrigerator, just looking, as if he were learning a language.
On my next payday I walked across Court Street to the bank and bought one fifty-dollar savings certificate, the way my husband did every payday since 1979. I put it in a new manila envelope and wrote three words on the front in my cafeteria printing. For Wade, someday. Then I locked it in the gun safe and gave myself permission to hope.
