Part 3 — A Familiar Handwriting
The second signature on the bottom line was the handwriting of my own daughter. Renee. The R with its tall hat, the tiny circle she had put over every i since the sixth grade. I put my hand flat on the cashier counter at the Horseshoe, because the floor was not steady.
Mr. Coker took the paper from me gently. I told him, in a voice I did not know was mine, “That is my daughter.” Bettye stood beside me in her church dress and did not say a word. I think she had known when she handed it over, and had waited to see whether I would reach the same place on my own.
Renee arrived at six in the morning. Mr. Coker had called her from the security office, and she drove the two hours with her hair undone and her work badge still pinned to her blouse. She came across the carpet and stopped three feet from me. She was crying before she opened her mouth.
“Mama, Royce said it was a burial policy,” she said. “He said you were worried about the cost of a funeral and that you wanted me to witness it so it would be proper. I signed it at your kitchen table on a Sunday. He told me not to mention it because you did not like to talk about dying. I thought it was sweet. I thought he was taking care of you.” I watched her hear herself say it. I watched the understanding arrive.
A policy of $250,000 with the medical exam waived does not buy a funeral. It buys a different kind of wager. Royce had used the daughter of the woman he married as the witness on a paper that made the woman worth more to him on paper than at the supper table. I did not let myself finish the thought. I put my arms around my child in the middle of a casino at six in the morning, and we stood there among the slot machines like two people at the bottom of a well.
Mr. Coker explained the law while a deputy from Tunica County waited politely beside him. Royce was arrested at the cashier cage for bigamy, which is a crime in Mississippi, for forging my signature on the ticket in Clarksdale, and for fraud on the application, which swore he was single and had a right to insure my life. The insurance company voided the policy by telephone within the hour. A policy written on a woman without her knowledge is only a piece of paper, and it burned the moment the truth touched it.
Royce did not fight. He stood with his hands behind his back in his pressed Wranglers and smelled of Old Spice, and for a moment he looked at me like a man trying to remember a line in a play. “Wanda, honey,” he began. I said, “Royce, you have the wrong name for me.” He closed his mouth. The deputy walked him out between the rows of blinking machines, and not one gambler looked up.
The judge in Panola County annulled the marriage in November, since Royce already had a wife and could not have been legally married to me. I am a widow of Harlan, not a bride of anybody, and I mean to keep it that way. Royce pleaded guilty in the winter. He received four years, and the court ordered the $11,860 repaid from his pension, with the $9,000 on the casino counter applied to my loss.
I drove to Clarksdale myself the following Saturday with a paper from the court in my purse. The clerk at the shop read it twice, and then he went into the back and came out with a velvet ring box. the gold band of Harlan, size 11, engraved H.P. plus W.P. 6-14-75. And the half-carat diamond of my mother from 1949. He pressed them into my palm and then wiped his eyes on his apron.
Renee and I drove home with the windows down. I told her she was not to blame for a man lying to her, and she nodded and looked out at the cotton stubble. I told her I was proud that she came to the casino. A person who runs toward the thing she is ashamed of has more courage than a person who sits in a fine chair and avoids it.
Bettye went back to Memphis, and she writes to me every May on the second Sunday, though she says she is only practicing, since she never had a daughter. I keep her cards in the tackle box of my late husband, under the plastic worms. We talk on the telephone on Sundays. Two women who were lied to by the same man have a great deal to say to each other, and none of it is bitter.
I drove a school bus for Tate County for thirty-one years, and I know how to count children and warning signs. I count them still at every table. The ring of Harlan is on my hand again. In the evenings I sit on the porch and turn it around and around, and I think of a man who was killed by a stroke in his pickup truck, and who has been looking after me ever since.
