Part 3 — Tag On The Keys
Misty screamed the name of a man called Cody, and then she stopped, her mouth open, and she screamed another. “Travis! Travis Rudd, you said she was already gone!” The shop went still. The detective turned slowly to the man by the door, who had stopped pulling at the lock. “Travis Rudd,” she repeated, as if she were tasting it. “The one who walked away from a halfway house in Oklahoma in March.”
That was the real name of the man who moved into my house with a lifted truck and no tag. Cody was a made-up name, borrowed from a boy he knew in prison. He had a warrant in Oklahoma for burglary and a second one in Arkansas he did not yet know about. He put his hands flat on the glass counter without being told. The broker had already dialed a number.
Then the detective said the thing I had been afraid to hear, and she said it gently. “Mrs. Greer, I want you to listen carefully. Mrs. Ferrell passed away peacefully in her recliner on Sunday morning. The coroner finished her report an hour ago. She died of heart failure. Natural causes. She was eighty-nine, and she was not hurt by anyone.”
I sat down on a stool and cried. I had pictured everything. I had seen the ring of keys and the paper tag with her name in my own handwriting, and I had imagined what a man like Travis might do in a house with a frail woman in it. And all that time she was already gone, sitting in her chair with her glasses in her lap and a crossword half finished. She had never known anyone was there.
Misty broke down at the counter. “We went there Sunday night because I knew where Mrs. Ferrell kept the good jewelry,” she said. “You used to tell me about it, Mama. We found her in her chair. She was already cold. Travis said we should take everything anyway, and I let him.” She wiped her face on her sleeve, and she looked about twelve. “I did not call anybody. I should have called somebody.”
The detective was careful and fair. Travis was arrested on both warrants and charged with burglary, theft from a deceased person, and forgery on the twenty-two tickets signed in my name. He was sent back to Oklahoma first and pleaded guilty there. He will serve six years. Misty was charged with burglary, theft, and identity fraud. Because of her addiction, the judge offered her a choice, a year in a residential treatment center in Little Rock, followed by probation, and if she finished it, the felony would be reduced.
I looked at my daughter, forty-one years old and picking at the scab on her arm, and I knew I could say nothing or I could say what was true. “Misty, I love you,” I said. “And what you did was wrong. Both of those things are going to stay in this room together.” A mother can love a child and still tell her the truth about what she did. Misty put her face against the shoulder of her old jacket and nodded.
The broker pushed the box of Clell across the glass to me. I opened it on that counter. The Purple Heart lay in its blue velvet exactly as it had for fifty years, the ribbon a little faded, the purple a little deeper than I remembered. I touched the edge with one finger. It was the first time in months that my hand had stopped shaking. He would not take the envelope of $1,140. He said he would be ashamed to.
My son Lyle drove up from Little Rock that evening and cried in my kitchen. He said he had told me to let her have it because he could not bear to picture his sister in handcuffs. I told him that the thing we cannot bear to picture is often the thing that will save the person. He nodded. Then he went out to the shed and fixed the hinge of my back gate, which had been squeaking since spring.
Janice, the niece of Mrs. Ferrell, came to my door on Thursday. She was holding a shoebox with the teaspoons of my grandmother inside, recovered from the broker, and the hearing aid wrapped in tissue. “Aunt Dot loved you,” she said. “She told me you were the only person who ever made her feel pretty.” Then she asked if I would do the hair of Aunt Dot one last time for the funeral. I said I would be honored.
I set her hair on the morning of the service at the funeral home, with my own rollers and my old can of spray. A wash, a set, a blue rinse. Her skin was quiet and cool, and her face was calm, and I talked to her the way I did for thirty years. When I finished, I patted her shoulder. “There you go, Dot,” I said. “Prettiest woman in Hot Springs.”
Misty writes from Little Rock every week in pencil. She asks about the garden. She asks about blue rinses. I visit on Sundays and bring her a pound cake. The box of Clell sits on my nightstand with the lid open, so that the ribbon catches the light, and in the quiet of the evening I put my fingers on it and tell him how the day went.
