The house in Statesville was a low brick ranch with a carport and a porch swing, on a street of crape myrtles in bloom. A silver Buick was parked in the drive, and in the flower bed by the steps, a row of red geraniums stood in coffee cans. I sat in the truck of Bud for ten minutes with the engine off. My hands lay in my lap. In the glove box were the sunglasses he never wore and a packet of mints from the pharmacy. I told myself that whatever was behind that door, I had survived forty seven years. I could survive the next ten minutes.
The woman who answered was fifty, I would say, tall and sturdy, with short gray hair and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She wore a scrubs top with ducks on it. She stared at me, and her face went through three or four changes before it settled. She said, “You are Faye.” I said I was. She said, “Oh, Lord.” She stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind her softly, as if there were someone inside who should not hear. “I am Darlene Lindley. I am so sorry. I have been wanting to meet you for twenty years.”
I said, “You are his wife.” She stared for a moment, then laughed, a short, startled, almost tearful laugh. “His wife? Faye, I am his daughter.” The porch tilted. I put a hand on the swing chain. She said, “Please sit. Please. I will get us some tea.” She came back with two tall glasses, and a plate of lemon cookies, and we sat on the swing with the plate between us. She said, “The woman in payroll made a mistake. In the emergency contact form, he wrote down my name and the word wife by mistake. He was nervous. He cannot spell.”
The heart sometimes keeps a second house, not out of betrayal, but because it could not bear to abandon either of the two it loved.
Darlene told it plainly. In 1974, when Bud was nineteen and working at a sawmill in Morganton, he fell in love with a girl who waited tables. She became pregnant. They were not married. Her family moved her away, and Bud was told he would have nothing to do with the child. He was a boy himself. He took a bus to Kingsport and began again. Three years later he met me, in a church parking lot. He told me he had been in love once and it ended badly. That was all. I never asked. It seemed a private pain, and I respected it.
“He found me in 2011,” Darlene said. “I was thirty seven. My mother had passed, and in the papers was a name and an address in Tennessee. I wrote to him. He drove to Statesville that weekend and stood on my porch for an hour before he rang. He cried like a baby. He said, I did not know. I did not know where you were. I would have walked across the country.” She wiped her eyes. “He said he had a wife he loved more than his life, and that it would break her if she thought he had lied to her. So he decided to do the next best thing. He decided to be a father in secret.”
The trucking route, she said, was for the money. In 2009, I had a long illness, which I called the pneumonia, and which was truly the beginning of the heart trouble. We had bills. Bud had borrowed against the house without telling me. He took the highway route to pay it down quietly. Then, when he found Darlene, the route happened to pass within ten minutes of her door. He stayed with her from Monday to Friday, in her spare room, eating her chili. He fished with her son on the weekends he did not come home. The fish he brought me were from his grandson.
I sat on the swing, with the glass sweating in my hand, and I felt two feelings at once, which is a thing I had not known was possible. I felt betrayed. Ten years of lies. All those Friday nights, I was making supper and he was lying about the weather at Boone Lake. And I felt something else, quieter and larger. I felt that my husband, whom I had thought I knew down to the bone, had been a better man than I had imagined, a man who had never let a child of his go without a father, even if it meant going to such lengths.
Darlene took a folder from the porch table. “He left this with me in October. He said, if anything happens, give it to Faye.” Inside was a letter in his careful block print. It said, Faye, I have told you a lot of lies and every one was for love. I could not stand to lose you. I could not stand to lose her either. Please forgive an old fool who tried to carry too much. The house is paid down. The truck is clear. There is a little money in the cookie tin in the shed. Go and see Darlene. She is the best part of me.
I read it twice. Then I put it in my purse. I did not say a word. I leaned over and put my arms around Darlene, and she put hers around me, and we sat on the swing for a long while, in the afternoon heat, while the crape myrtles dropped their petals onto the porch. A boy of twenty came around the corner of the house, in a baseball cap, holding a fishing rod. He stopped dead when he saw me. Darlene said, “Dylan, this is your grandmother.” The boy took off his cap. His hair was exactly the hair of Bud.
I stayed three days. I slept in the spare room where my husband slept, in a narrow bed with a patchwork quilt, and in the morning I made pancakes. Dylan took me fishing at a pond behind the church. He caught a bass. I caught nothing. On the last evening we sat on the porch with a bowl of peaches and talked about Bud until the fireflies came out. When I drove home I carried a jar of the chili of Darlene on the passenger seat, and a photograph of three people at a lake. And I told the empty road, aloud, “You old fool. You should have told me.” I was smiling.
