I did not go to the diner the next morning. I sat on the edge of my bed in my robe with the letter from the Department of Corrections in my lap, and I read it a third time. It was dated March of 2002. It said that inmate Wanda Pickett had completed a program in the culinary kitchen of the women prison in Chillicothe and was eligible for work release, and that Mr. Delancey, her correspondent, was thanked for his support. Bud had signed his name at the bottom, as a sponsor, in pencil. I put my hand over my mouth. He had never told me. Not once, in ten years of marriage after.
At noon I drove to the little rented house Wanda keeps on Ohio Avenue, with a flowering plum in the front yard, and I knocked. She opened the door in her apron, still smelling of coffee and fried onions, because she had walked home between shifts. She looked at my face and she knew. She did not say a word. She stepped aside, and I came in, and we sat at her kitchen table on two chairs that did not match. I put the letter between us. “Wanda,” I said, “I watched the tape. I need you to tell me what you are asking Bud to forgive.”
She told me in a flat, tired voice, the voice of a woman who has rehearsed a speech for twenty three years. In September of 1999 she was thirty seven, with a boy of fourteen and an eviction notice. She broke into the diner at two in the morning with a crowbar and ran off with the cash box, twenty four hundred dollars. Bud found the broken lock at dawn and told the sheriff nothing. A year later she was arrested in another county for bad checks, and from a cell in Chillicothe she wrote Bud a single letter to say she was sorry. He wrote back. He wrote every week for a year.
A hundred dollar bill and a dark dining room gave one diner owner the length of a single weekend to bring her nephew back to the truth in Sedalia.
I gave my terms at that table, over a cup of her weak coffee. I would tell no one. I would not fire her. I would not accept one more dollar. But I wanted her to hear the end of the story from Bud, in his own words, on a sheet I had found at the bottom of the box, and I wanted her to read it out loud to me, because my eyes were too wet to do it. She took the sheet with both hands. It was one line, in pencil, dated the week before he passed. Wanda paid in full in 2010. Tell Ruby when she is ready. B.
But the story did not end at her kitchen table. My nephew Dwight, who has wanted my diner since Bud passed, had seen the tape too. My grandson had left the tablet on the counter, and Dwight copied the video to his phone. By Saturday evening, half of Sedalia had heard that the waitress of Ruby was an ex convict who broke in. He showed up at the diner in a pressed shirt, grinning, at closing. “Aunt Ruby, I did you a favor,” he said. “I told people. Now you can sell. Nobody will want to eat here after this.” I looked at him and understood everything.
I walked to the register and took out the coffee can of hundred dollar bills that I had carried from home that morning, twenty six thousand four hundred dollars of it, to put in the hands of Wanda. Dwight saw the can and the cash and his eyes went wide. He snatched it from the counter, meaning to run to the sheriff office across the road and claim it was stolen money that belonged in evidence, and he made for the door with the can under his arm like a football. The door chimed. In the doorway stood six truckers.
They were the regulars from the Friday night haul, six big men in boots, who had come in for pie. The biggest, a man named Tiny Bledsoe, who is six feet five and has not been called Tiny by anyone since the third grade, folded his arms and filled the door from side to side. “Evening, Dwight,” he said. “Where you going with Miss Ruby money?” Dwight stopped. He looked at the six faces, and at the can, and at his aunt. Tiny put out one hand. Dwight put the can in it. Tiny carried it back to the counter as gently as a sleeping baby.
I fired nobody. I put the name of Wanda on the deed of the diner the next morning, as a partner, with half of everything, in front of the lawyer and a plate of pie. Dwight lost a good deal more. The truckers of Highway 50, a tight bunch with long memories, stopped buying fuel at the station where he worked until he was let go. The story of Wanda did get around, in the end, but not the way he planned it. It got around the way good stories do, over eggs, and people began to leave her tips as big as the check. Some left notes.
In the name of Bud, who passed in 2012, I started the Bud Delancey Fund. It pays for job training, work clothes and a first month of rent for people leaving prison, in Pettis, Cooper and Benton counties. In the first year we placed thirty four men and women in kitchens, garages and farms. A young man named Jesse, twenty six, with a tattoo on his neck, cried in the back office of my diner when he got his first apron. I told him that was where my husband would have wanted him, and I handed him a spatula and a piece of lemon meringue.
Wanda still works the front, in the same apron, though she says she is a partner now and ought to wear a nicer one. I tell her she has earned the right to wear whatever she likes. On the last Friday of every month, when I count the drawer at midnight, it comes out exactly even. But there is something under the tray, folded small. It is a hundred dollar bill. I keep putting it in the coffee can, and every month Wanda keeps leaving it, and neither of us has said a word. I think Bud would call that a draw. I think he is smiling.
