At 6:45 that night, Lyle drove me to a low brick building on the east side of Kokomo, with a flower garden out front and a sign that read Garden House Care Home. He parked, turned off the engine, and sat with both hands on the wheel. He had worn his VFW cap for thirty one years, and it sat on the dashboard now like a retired friend. I am Patsy Dobbs, seventy two years old, and I had expected a woman in a cheap motel or a house with a mailbox, and I had braced my whole heart against it. I had not expected this.
“Her name is Ruth Ann,” Lyle said, in the voice of a man reciting a prayer. “She is my sister. She was eighteen months older than me. In the winter of 1994, she was in a car accident on Highway 31, and she came out of it with a brain injury and a mind that never came all the way back. My mother could not bear the shame. She made me promise never to tell anyone, not even you. She said it would reflect on the family. So I have come to see her every Tuesday since.”
I sat in the cold car with the bank envelope on my lap, and I thought of every Tuesday of thirty one years. The blizzards. The graduations of the girls. The year I had gotten so cross that I almost followed him. And through all of it, he had been sitting in a plain room, holding the hand of his sister. The money, he went on, came from the sale of the family farm, which his mother had left to be used only for Ruth Ann care. Two point one million dollars, minus every year of the home. “I should have told you,” he whispered.
A calendar with every Tuesday circled in red gave one transmission plant wife the length of an evening drive to bring her husband back to the truth in Kokomo.
I gave my terms there in the dark of the parked car, with my hand over his. “Lyle Dobbs, I was angry in that bank, and I am not angry now. But you will never carry this alone again. Tonight you will take me inside, and I will meet Ruth Ann. Next Tuesday, I am coming too. We will tell our girls the truth on Sunday, at the table, and they will come with us in the weeks after. And we will make sure this money does exactly what your mother wanted, with a lawyer who is not your brother.”
Lyle took off his cap and pressed it against his face. “Patsy, I was afraid you would think she was something to be ashamed of,” he said. “I was afraid you would look at me different. My mother told me for thirty years that nobody could know.” He put the cap down on the dashboard. “And my brother Warren knew, and he said he would keep it quiet for a price. I have been paying him a little every year for the silence. I did not know how to say no.” His voice cracked. “I am sorry, Pats.” A knock came on the window of the car before I could answer. A heavy man of seventy was standing in the circle of light from the porch, in a suede jacket, with a gold ring on every finger, and I knew him from a hundred Christmases. Warren Dobbs. “Lyle,” he said loudly through the glass, “I heard you were bringing her here tonight. I need to talk to you about the account.” When Lyle rolled down the window, Warren reached in, snatched the bank envelope off my lap, and ran for the parking lot.
He got fifteen steps. The night nurse of the care home, a stout woman named Doreen in pink scrubs, came out of the door and stood in his way. Three residents in bathrobes, who had been watching from the lighted window of the sunroom, shuffled out onto the porch on their walkers and filled the path. And the old Navy friend of Lyle, Fred,, who had driven separately, got out of his pickup and stood behind Warren with arms folded. The night was warm, and crickets sang in the flower beds, and nobody said a word.
Warren stopped on the path with the envelope in his big ringed fist, trapped between the nurse and the walkers and the glare of the porch light. A thin, gray haired woman in a quilted robe came up behind Doreen, leaning on the arm of an aide. She looked at Warren and her face lit up with simple delight. “Warren,” Ruth Ann said, clearly, “you came to see me.” He stood utterly still. Then the envelope slipped from his hand, and he took off his cap and walked to his sister, and bent his head.
The consequences were real and not unkind. Warren confessed to the whole family on Sunday, and he returned every dollar he had taken from Lyle, borrowing against the Harley dealership he had run into the dirt. He visited Ruth Ann the next Tuesday with a bunch of grocery store daisies. We sat with her in the sunroom, the four of us, Lyle and Warren and I and Ruth Ann, and she told us the same story three times, laughing, and we laughed with her each time as if we had never heard it.
In the name of my mother Opal, who passed in 2007, I started the Opal Kline Fund. It pays for long term care placements for adults with brain injuries and for volunteer visitor programs for people in care homes with no family, in Howard, Tipton and Cass counties. In the first year we placed eleven adults in good homes and trained one hundred and forty visitors. One was a seventy five year old retired mechanic who visited a stranger every Tuesday for six months, sat beside her bed, and read aloud from the newspaper.
On a Tuesday evening in October, I sat in the sunroom of Garden House with a plate of oatmeal cookies, watching Lyle play checkers with his sister under a lamp. Our three daughters were there, with their husbands and children, filling the room with noise. Ruth Ann jumped two of his pieces and crowed. Lyle looked over at me with a wide smile, wearing his VFW cap again, though now with a small embroidered patch on the brim. It read, Tuesday Club. I raised a cookie to him, and he saluted.
