Patrick closed the front door of the old house in Savannah behind him, stood in the hall with the key still in his hand, and looked at the pillowcase on the floor of the sewing room as though it might explode. I stood among the lottery tickets, thirty three thousand, two hundred dollars in my lap, sixty three years old. “Debbie,” he said, “do you have the second page?” I told him I had not. He closed his eyes and let out a breath that was almost a sob. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God. I have had it in my wallet for eight days, and I have not been able to throw it away.”
He took a folded sheet of pink stationery from his billfold, soft with handling, and held it out to me with a hand that trembled. It was the second page of the note of Lucille. I read it standing among the forgotten tickets. “Deborah, I was unkind to you for thirty years because I was afraid. You were the only person who ever looked my son in the eye and told him the truth, and I could not bear that a woman like you had married a man like him. Not our kind, I said. I meant that you were better than we were.”
The page went on. Every check that Patrick had forged on our joint account, forty one of them in nine years, Lucille had quietly repaid in cash, and she had put the money back in the pillowcase in the wall, to give to me when the time came. The class ring, she wrote, was the ring Patrick had pawned at nineteen for his first lottery debt, and she had bought it back. Three decades of covering for her son, and all of it for my sake, in the end. I read the last line twice. “Do not forgive him too quickly, but do not leave him too soon.”
A pillowcase pulled from a window frame gave one wife the afternoon to bring her husband back to the truth in Savannah.
I gave my terms there in the sewing room, with the pink page in one hand and the ring in the other. “Patrick, here is what is going to happen. You will give me every card, every account and every lottery ticket in this house, and you will go with me on Monday to the counselor that your mother paid for years ago and you never called. The money in the pillowcase is mine, and I am putting it in an account that only I can touch. And you will tell me the truth about the whole amount, all of it, tonight, at the kitchen table, or I am going to my sister in Atlanta.”
Patrick sank onto the window seat that had been painted shut for fifty years. “Debbie,” he said, “I started the day I turned nineteen, with a dollar ticket from a gas station. I won forty dollars and I thought I had found the secret of the universe. I have been looking for that feeling for forty four years. I borrowed against our house last spring. Sixty thousand dollars. I was going to win it back before you ever knew.” His face crumpled. “My mother knew every single thing. She never said a word to me. She just paid. I thought it was love. It was fear.”
As he spoke, Patrick looked at the pink page in my hand and seemed to realize that the last line was about him. He lunged across the sewing room, snatched the page and the pillowcase from my lap, and ran for the hall, wild eyed, intending to burn them in the kitchen sink. He did not reach the hall. Mrs. Odessa Greer, the housekeeper of Lucille for thirty one years, who had been standing silent in the doorway of the sewing room with a feather duster, stepped across the threshold and held up a hand. “Mr. Patrick,” she said, “sit down.”
Patrick stopped in the middle of the hall with his hands full. Mrs. Greer was five feet tall, in a gray uniform and a white apron, and in thirty one years nobody had ever disobeyed her. “Your mother told me,” she said quietly, “that if you ever tried to run with that page, I was to stand in your way. She said, Odessa, he runs from everything, and this time he must stay.” Patrick looked at her. Then he slowly sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, and set the page and the pillowcase on his knees, and put his face into his hands.
The money consequences were clear. The sixty thousand dollar loan against the house was paid off by the sale of the small cottage that Lucille had left to Patrick, and the rest of her estate, by her will, was held in trust so that he could not touch it without my signature. The thirty three thousand, two hundred dollars in the pillowcase went into an account in my name alone, and Patrick signed a paper handing over every lottery card and account in his name. I would not sell the old house. I could not.
In the name of Lucille, who passed in the summer, I started the Lucille Whitmore Fund. It pays for counseling and emergency help for families harmed by lottery and gambling debts, in Chatham, Bryan and Effingham counties. In the first year we helped fifty four households keep their homes. One was a retired bus driver of seventy from Pooler who had spent his pension on scratch offs. When his electricity was turned back on, he sat in the kitchen with all the lights lit and said it looked like a different house.
Patrick completed the first ninety days of counseling in the autumn and then the second. On a warm Sunday in October, we drove to the old house in Savannah, and I opened the sewing room window at last. We stood together in the stream of air. He put his arm around my waist, and I let him. Mrs. Greer was in the kitchen, humming. He held up the class ring that his mother had bought back, turned it in the light, and put it into my hand. “Keep it for me,” he said. I closed my fingers around it.
