Dennis put his beer down very slowly on the kitchen counter, and he told me what was beneath the rose garden of our mother in a voice I had not heard from him since we were children. “Gail,” he said, “it is not what you are thinking. Daddy did not run off with a waitress from Springfield. He came home in the fall of 1987. He was sick, and he had lost everything at the tables in Branson. Mama took him in. She hid him in the back room for a year. And when he passed, she did not have the heart to take him anywhere. She laid him to rest under the roses.”
I stood in the sewing room in Joplin with the yellowed insurance policy in my hand and the Singer cabinet open at my feet. I was sixty two years old, and I had spent forty years believing my father had abandoned us for a woman at a truck stop. Dennis pulled out a kitchen chair for me and I sat. He said Mama had told him everything on her last night in the hospital, in a whisper, and made him promise to wait until I found the box. “That is why she drew the circles,” he said. “She wanted you to find the truth by yourself.”
He explained the policy. Mama had taken it out in 1980 when Daddy first began to gamble, thinking that if anything happened to him the family would be safe. When he came home to be nursed in the winter of 1988, she claimed the fifty thousand dollars, paid off his debts one by one, and told no one the truth. She said he ran away because she could not bear to have us know that he had come home a ruined man and that she had loved him anyway. She let me hate him for forty years rather than let me see him fail.
A sewing machine cabinet drawer pulled from its frame gave one daughter the afternoon to bring her brother back to their mother in Joplin.
I gave my terms at the kitchen table, with the policy in front of me and the betting statements fanned out beside it. “Dennis, I am not angry at you for hiding what Mama told you. I am angry about the betting. Two years of losses, circled in red, in her own hand, every deposit from her own account. You are going to the meeting at the Methodist church tonight, and you are going to keep going. The forty one thousand dollars in the little box is going into an account in my name. And tomorrow morning, you and I are going to go out to the rose garden, with a spade, together.”
Dennis lowered his head onto his folded arms. “I started on football in college,” he said, muffled, “and by the time I moved in with Mama, I was betting on anything with a score. I took her checkbook the first month. I told myself I was doing it for her. She circled every deposit, Gail. She knew the entire time. She never once said a word. She just wrote it down, and she hid the money, and she waited for you.” He lifted his face, wet and gray. “I am just like Daddy. I have always been just like Daddy.”
At that, Dennis snatched the betting statements and the old policy off the table and ran, half blind with shame, toward the back door of the house, intending to throw them into the rose garden and burn them where they lay. My husband Don, a retired lineman of sixty four who had been out in the driveway all morning with the van, stepped through the kitchen door just as Dennis reached it and caught him square in the chest, gently, with both hands, like a man catching a falling pole.
“Easy, Dennis,” said Don. “Easy. You are not going anywhere with that.” Dennis struggled for a moment. Then the strength went out of his legs, and he sagged against my husband and let himself be held, with the papers crumpled between them. Don looked over his shoulder at me with calm brown eyes. I rose from the kitchen chair, crossed the floor, and took the papers from my brother, one at a time, smoothing each one flat on the table. Then I put my arms around him.
The money consequences were tidy. Dennis agreed in writing to repay the account from his wages, and a lawyer recovered thirteen thousand dollars of the stolen money from the sportsbook under the rules for problem gamblers. The house of Mama, which was not mortgaged at all, as it turned out, went on the market in the spring. We took the policy, the ring of Daddy and the sewing scissors of Mama, and had them placed in a small oak box that now sits on my own mantel, in Joplin, in the sun.
In the name of Mama, Bernice Whitaker, who passed in the winter, I started the Bernice Whitaker Fund. It pays for sewing machines and fabric for young brides in need, and for gambling counseling for families, in Jasper, Newton and Lawrence counties. In the first year we sewed forty two wedding dresses and helped thirty one families with counseling. One bride was a nineteen year old from Carthage who stood in the fitting room in the borrowed shoes of her mother and said it was the first time she had felt beautiful.
Dennis and I went out to the rose garden on a bright morning in May. He carried a spade. The roses were in bloom, pink and white and deep red, and the air smelled sweet. We knelt at the base of the oldest bush, and we did not dig. We simply stayed there, side by side, for a long time. I told him that Daddy had come home. He nodded. The sun climbed over the fence, and a bee moved from flower to flower. Then Dennis took my hand, and said, “Tell me about the dress.”
