I read the first page standing at the tailgate with the lake slapping at the boat ramp and my fishermen idling out toward the bridge, and my son holding on to the side of his truck like a man at sea. The certificate was a marriage license, yellow and soft at the folds. Harlan Wayne Pruitt, nineteen. Ruby Nell Cobb, eighteen. The third of June, 1971, in the probate court of Phenix City. I read the name three times. I had been married to that man for forty nine years, and he had never once said her name.
The second page was in the shaky hand of Harlan, in pencil. Lee, I was married once before you, for eleven months. She was a good girl and I was a fool, and it ended in a courtroom with a judge saying words I did not understand. The paper is attached. I never told you because I was ashamed of the boy I was before I knew you, and because afterwards there was nothing to tell. You were my first real wife and my last. The brass key opens the box at the Eufaula bank. Go and see.
“Mama,” Dwayne said, sitting down hard on the tailgate, “the lawyer in Clayton told me that Daddy left him instructions. Hand it to you if anybody ever tried to sell that land. He made me read the first line before I could stop myself. I did not know about the first Mrs. Pruitt either. I swear on my children.” He covered his face with both hands. I noticed that they were shaking, and I noticed too that I was not angry, only tired and curious, which is how I feel when I have been left a good puzzle.
We went to the bank in Eufaula that afternoon, Dwayne driving without a word. The manager, a gray haired woman named Mrs. Tillery, took the brass key and led us down a cold marble hall to box number 61. Inside, in a gray tin container, lay three things. A decree of annulment from 1972, stamped by a judge in Phenix City, ending the first marriage as if it had never been. A recorded deed from 1996. And a long letter, folded in thirds, with my name on the front, spelled the way only he ever spelled it.
A secret kept out of shame is a weight, but a secret left behind out of love is a gift.
I read the deed aloud in the cold quiet of that vault, in the voice I used to use at the tag office. Forty one acres on the north end of Lake Eufaula, with the house and the barn and every improvement, conveyed unto Lee Pruitt, her heirs and assigns forever, in fee simple absolute, with no power of sale in any other person. Dwayne sat down on the bench against the wall. “So no developer can touch it,” he whispered, “unless you say so. It was never going to be mine to sign.” I told him it was never going to be anyone to sign but me.
The letter was short. Lee, you are not too dumb to balance a checkbook. You balanced mine for fifty years and caught every mistake. If Dwayne said different, he is either lying or scared, and in either case he is my son and I love him. The land is yours. Let him ask, not take. The only thing I want you to do with the barn upstairs is let people sleep in it. It was the only place on earth I could hear myself think. Let some tired fisherman hear himself, too. Your Harlan.
I handed the letter to my son. He read it standing, and when he had finished, he folded it and gave it back with both hands, the way a man returns a thing he has no right to hold. “Daddy never said those words about you,” he said. “I made them up. Kimberly and I owe the developer fifteen thousand dollars, an advance on the land, and I was afraid. I am so sorry, Mama.” I looked at him a long time. Then I said, “I am not going to pay it. You are going to work it off.”
That fall, Dwayne drove down from Montgomery every Saturday and built a dock and a deck off the bunk room, and a rail for the ladder, and a sign that said Pruitt Landing in white letters that I did not ask for. He worked in the rain. He worked with a sunburn. Kimberly came with him and scrubbed floors and hung curtains, and one day on the porch, over a pitcher of tea, she said she was sorry too. I gave her a glass and told her to sit down. Some things are easier to say with ice in your hand.
The October tournament filled every bed. Men came from Ohio and Michigan and Kentucky and one from as far as Maine, and they climbed down that ladder at four in the morning to my biscuits and coffee on the porch. By Christmas I had paid off the debt of Dwayne, the last five hundred out of his own pocket, and he handed me the receipt and looked at his shoes. I took it and put it in the tin recipe box on the shelf, between the cornbread and the pound cake, where we keep what matters.
In the spring I did something I had been thinking about for months. I wrote a letter to Ruby Nell. It took me four drafts. She answered in a week, from Opelika, in the large round hand of a retired schoolteacher, and we met at a diner halfway between us on a Tuesday. She was seventy years old and wearing lavender. We talked for three hours about a nineteen year old boy with a cowlick who could not fix a flat tire, and we laughed so loud the waitress came over twice. We parted as friends.
The glasses of Harlan still sit on the top rung of the ladder to the bunk room. Nobody moves them. The fishermen see them and nod, and some of them take off their caps. On the beam above the door, in my own hand, in white paint, I added a line under the sign. First wife and last, Lee. The lake lies below it in the evening, as quiet as a held breath, and in the big door of the barn upstairs I sit sometimes with a cup of coffee, and I can hear myself think.
