Uncle Harlan sat in the shade of the big oak with the blanket on his lap and the microphone from the bingo table now somehow in his hands, and ninety members of the Pickett family stared at him with their mouths open. The Smoky Mountain breeze moved through the pavilion and fluttered the paper bingo cards. Somewhere a baby began to fuss. Brenda stood at the front of the pavilion with her gold house pin and her pressed linen dress, perfectly still, like a woman who has heard a footstep in her own attic after thirty nine years.
“She was already carrying the baby of Dwight,” Harlan said, finishing the sentence that had broken off. “That is why Marlene begged me not to arrest her. She said, Harlan, if you take that girl away now, that child will have no mother. And Marlene, who had just been dragged into the worst night of her life, was still thinking of the baby.” He turned the microphone slowly toward me. “That is the woman Brenda has been calling the maid for thirty nine years. The woman who gave her a son and a family and asked for nothing in return.”
I stood at the back of the pavilion with my apron in my arms. I wanted to disappear. But I also remembered that night so clearly that I could smell the chlorine. I had gone to room fourteen with towels at midnight and found the door ajar. I had seen the man with the briefcase and the girl with the frightened face. Later I had seen her at two in the morning, wet to the skin, standing in the parking lot shaking, and I had given her my sweater, and she had looked at me with enormous eyes and said nothing.
She who keeps another secret with a sweater and silence is the truest family a woman can find.
Brenda put down the bingo microphone. She did it slowly, gently, as if it were a living thing. She looked at her husband, Dwight, who was staring at her with his mouth slightly open, and she said in a voice I had never heard from her, small and rusty, “Dwight, I was twenty one. Lyle Gaskins was a man I met at a real estate seminar. He told me he could make me rich. He had the cash from the land office. He wanted me to help him leave town with it.” She swallowed. “I said no. And in the room, he grabbed me.”
“I pushed him,” she said. “I did not mean to. He fell backward through the sliding door and into the pool. I stood on the concrete and I watched him go under. I was so frightened. I could not move. By the time I thought to jump in, he was still. I left the money in the room. I walked out into the parking lot and Marlene Pickett put a sweater around my shoulders.” She was crying now without any sound at all. “She never told. Not once. Not ever. And I hated her for it. Because every time I saw her, I saw what I had done.”
The pavilion had gone dead silent. A little girl in a pink dress said in a loud whisper, “Mama, why is Aunt Brenda crying?” and her mother shushed her. I walked down the aisle between the folding tables, past all my cousins and all my children and my grandchildren, and when I reached the front I did not say anything. I simply put my arms around my sister in law. She was shaking like a leaf. She smelled of hairspray and perfume and thirty nine years of fear. I held her until the shaking stopped.
“You did not murder him, Brenda,” Harlan said from his chair, in his slow gravelly voice. “I read the report of the coroner myself. He had a blood alcohol of point two three and a bruise on his head from the sliding door. It was an accident. I closed that file in a day because I wanted to protect two young women and an unborn child. I should have told you it was closed, honey. I should have told you thirty nine years ago.” Brenda stared at him with her hand pressed to her chest. “It was an accident?” she whispered. “I have lived with this since I was twenty one.”
Dwight stood up from the bench. My brother, sixty six years old, a heavy gentle man with a farmer tan, crossed the grass in three steps and put his arms around both of us at once. “Bren,” he said into her hair, “you should have told me. Nothing in this world could have made me love you less.” She laughed, a cracked, helpless laugh, and sobbed into his shoulder. Their son, Daniel, thirty eight, who had come from Nashville with his wife and twin girls, stepped up behind them and set a hand on the back of his mother.
When it was over, Brenda picked up the microphone again. I thought she might make a speech. Instead she held it out to me with both hands, like a woman handing over a crown. “Marlene,” she said, “I am sorry for every unkind word. I am sorry for the five dollars. I am sorry for the maid. Will you please call the next game?” I looked at the mic. I looked at her. I looked at ninety faces with their cards in their hands and their eyes bright and wet. And I took it, and I smiled.
“B 12,” I said. “B 12. Under the B.” The whole pavilion cheered, and somebody started clapping, and the children laughed. I called every number that afternoon, until the shadows grew long under the oak. Brenda sat in the front row with her card, marking squares with a shaking pen. At the end, when a lady in the third row shouted bingo, Brenda leaped to her feet and began handing out the prizes, a box of chocolate and a quilted potholder, and she gave me the biggest one: a gold house pin from her lapel.
I wear it on my apron now, at the motel by the go kart track, when I strip the beds and fold the towels. The younger maids ask about it. I tell them it is from a friend. I tell them also that a woman who cleans rooms sees everything and says almost nothing, and that this is not a weakness. It is a way of loving. I tell them to keep their eyes open, and their sweaters ready, and their mouths shut for the people who need them to be. And the next Labor Day, I call B 12 again.
