The trailer park off Highway 52 was a place I had driven past for forty years without a thought. Lot 14 was a faded yellow single wide with a plastic slide in the yard and a pot of red geraniums by the steps, the kind of pot I would have chosen myself. I sat in the Buick with the engine off for ten minutes. My church dress was sticking to my back. Then I picked up the number on the electric bill, and I walked to the door, and I knocked before I could lose my nerve.
A young woman answered with a dish towel over her shoulder. She was thirty or so, with dark hair pulled back and a tired, pretty face, and I knew that face. I knew the chin. I had kissed that chin on a man for forty four years. She looked at my dress, and at my pocketbook held in both hands, and she said, very quietly, “You are Mavis.” I could not answer. She said, “Please come in. He told me you would come one day. He said you would wear your church dress.”
The inside of the trailer was spotless. There were crayon drawings on the refrigerator and a stack of library books on the table. A little girl in a purple nightgown peeked around a door, five years old with two missing teeth. “Is that the lady?” she asked. The young woman nodded. “Lily, this is Miss Mavis.” The child looked at me for a long, serious moment. “You look like the pictures of Papaw,” she said, and she walked straight over and leaned against my knee.
Her name was Kayla Dean. She was thirty one, a nursing assistant at the hospital in Lake City, and she was the daughter of my husband. I want to tell this part plainly, the way she told it to me, because I do not think I could bear to say it twice. In 1994, long before he ever met the church men group at the beach, Dewitt had a short, foolish season with a waitress in Myrtle Beach. The waitress, Loretta, became pregnant. Dewitt sent money. Loretta never asked for anything else, and Dewitt never told me.
A man who is afraid of one hard conversation can spend thirty years making it harder, and call the silence kindness.
Kayla said her mother died of cancer in 2011, in a hospice in Conway, and that Dewitt came to the bedside for the first time that week. Loretta made him promise to look after the girl, who was sixteen. He kept the promise in the only way he knew how. He bought her a prepaid phone so she could always reach him, and he paid the bill every month. He never told me because, Kayla said, he knew I could not have children, and he could not stand the thought of putting that wound back in my hands.
I sat very still. I want to be honest here. I was angry. I was angrier than I have ever been in my life, standing in a kitchen in a trailer park, at a dead man. Forty four years, and he did not trust me with the truth. But the anger had no place to go. It rose and then it just sat there in my chest, because the child was leaning on my knee, and she had his chin, and she was holding my hand.
Kayla showed me the flip phone. It lived in the pillowcase of Lily, she said, tucked under her head every night. Dewitt called every Sunday at seven, and he read Lily a story over the speaker, one chapter at a time, from a book of animal stories. He never missed. When he died, Kayla did not know how to tell a five year old, so Lily kept the phone close and answered it fast, in case. “When your call came, she thought it was him,” Kayla said. I put my hand over my mouth.
I stayed until the sun went down. We ate cornbread and beans at the little table. Lily showed me her loose tooth and her stuffed rabbit and the page where the chapter ended. I read the next one to her out loud, in my Sunday voice, and she fell asleep against my arm before the last paragraph. Kayla stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed, crying without a sound. When I carried Lily to bed, she whispered in her sleep, “Papaw.”
Driving home on Highway 52, I stopped at the red light by the Piggly Wiggly and remembered I had told my son I was buying a few things. I bought a gallon of milk and a bag of flour. At home, my son asked where I had been, and I told him the truth. He sat down hard on the sofa. After a long minute, he said, “Mama, I have a niece?” I said, “You have a niece, and a sister, and a great many Sunday dinners to plan.”
The phone is still active. I pay the fifteen dollars myself now, and on Sunday nights at seven I sit at the kitchen table in my robe with the speaker on, and I read the next chapter. Lily is learning to read along. Last week she corrected me on a word. Dewitt would have laughed himself breathless. I like to think he can hear us from the back porch, with the Braves on the radio, finally forgiven by the only people whose forgiveness he ever needed.
