Part 3 — Forty Seventh Entry
Tanner read the name over the shoulder of Ms. Albright, and then he said it out loud, very softly, like a boy saying a prayer. “Eli.” Elijah Otis Pickens, born in Tuscumbia, six years old. I looked at my grandson, and he looked at me, and I understood that Tanner had known about that little boy for a long time.
He told it standing under the tent with the whole family listening. Three summers ago, when he was thirteen, Papaw Otis took him fishing on Pickwick Lake and stopped at a bait stand where a young woman named Tammy was holding the hand of a freckled toddler. Papaw knelt down and said, “Tanner, this is your brother, and he is one of ours.” Then he made my grandson promise to keep it quiet until the right day came.
I sat down on the cornhole board. It all fit together like the squares of a quilt. In 2019 a letter had come to our house from Tuscumbia, and Otis read it on the porch and put it in his shirt pocket. The baby had been named for him. Otis never told me, because he thought he was protecting me and our daughter, and because he was waiting for enough courage. He only said he would see to the last certificate himself, for the youngest. I never asked who that was.
Ms. Albright explained what the paper meant. Otis had re-registered the forty-seventh certificate to the baby, with himself as the owner and me as the co-owner. That is why it could not be cashed with a forged signature. It had been sitting safe with the Treasury for six years, quietly earning interest, for a child who did not know his grandfather had thought of him. The one thing Jarrod could not steal was the one thing that was never in my name alone.
Misty stood up out of the lawn chair. Her voice was very small. “Jarrod, who is Eli?” He opened his mouth, and for once nothing came out of it. “You bought me a house,” she said, “with the money of my mother, while you had a son you were not feeding.” Nobody under that tent moved. A child in the pool splashed once and went still.
The bank did what banks are supposed to do. It refunded me every cent of the $62,400, all forty-six certificates, within the month. Jarrod pleaded guilty to forgery and theft in the spring. The house in Killen was sold, the $58,000 came back out of the sale, and the rest he is paying from his wages under a court order. He received five years of probation and a felony on his record that he cannot talk his way around.
The family court dealt with the boy. A judge ordered child support for Eli, paid directly and on time, so that Tammy never had to ask Jarrod for anything again. She cried in the hallway when she told me. She said she had never wanted my money. She only wanted her son to have a last name he could say without looking at the floor.
I went to Pickwick Lake on a Saturday in November with Tanner driving. Eli was waiting at the bait stand in a Crimson Tide jacket two sizes too big. He looked at me, a seventy-three-year-old woman in orthopedic shoes, and decided in about four seconds that I was acceptable. I had brought a pan of yeast rolls. He ate five. I have fed a lot of hungry children, and I know the look of one who is just getting to know you.
Misty came to my apartment the next week with her eyes swollen. She did not ask for anything. She told me she would work a second job and give Tanner a better example than the one she had chosen. I held her face in both hands, the way I did when she was small. I told her that a mistake is only a mistake until you decide to stay in it.
I opened the green spiral notebook to the last page and wrote one more line in my careful cafeteria printing. Number forty-seven, Elijah Otis Pickens, delivered. Then I closed it and taped it back under the drawer of my old Singer, where it will stay.
I started again that payday. One fifty-dollar certificate, for Eli, every month, as long as my knees and my pension allow. Otis called it the Hutchins college fund. He would be tickled to know it has one more name on the list than either of us ever guessed.
On Sundays now we all sit at the long table in my little apartment on Cox Creek Parkway, Tanner and Misty and a freckled boy who says grace faster than anybody. The room is too small for us. I would not trade one inch of it.
