Part 3 — Guarantor Of Record
Geraldine turned the sheet toward me and I read the name printed under GUARANTOR. Otis Pruitt. My husband. The name I had not said out loud since the day we buried him two years ago. I read it three times, and each time the letters stayed exactly where they were.
Charlene made a sound beside me, and I took her hand under the tablecloth. Geraldine spoke carefully. “The child is a little boy named Dwight Junior, now six years old. In 2019 he was taken to a children hospital in Mobile with a severe asthma attack, and his mother had no insurance. The bill was $3,800. Mr. Pruitt signed as the guarantor, and he paid it off in full by the end of that year.”
I sat very still and I thought about the Coca-Cola truck and the bad back of my husband and the way Otis went quiet at the supper table in the fall of 2019. I understood then that he had known, and that he had carried a secret that was not his to carry because he could not stand the thought of a baby struggling to breathe. Otis had a soft heart. It was the best thing and the hardest thing about him.
Charlene stood up. She was shaking, but her voice was level. “Daddy knew,” she said. “And Dwight, you stood at the casket of my father and held my hand.” Her husband half rose from his chair. “Baby, I can explain.” Deacon Hollins did not raise his voice. “Son, you can explain it to the sheriff. He is waiting in the vestibule.”
I had asked Geraldine to arrange that, just in case. A deputy from Forrest County had been sitting in the church lobby for an hour with a cup of coffee, and when the deacon nodded, he came through the double doors with his hat in his hand. Dwight was arrested for theft by false pretense, for inventing a surgery to take $41,500 from a woman he called his mother.
He did not make a scene. He asked if he could leave his tea glass on the table. He was quieter than I had ever seen him, and he walked out between two good Mississippi men in uniform. A lie told in a church always sounds the loudest on the way out.
The account in Mobile belonged to Tammy Lowry, the mother of the little boy, who had believed for years that Dwight made good money at a car dealership. When the bank froze the account, she called me herself, crying. She sent back every dollar she had not spent, which came to $39,300. The other $2,200 had gone for medicine for the boy and a breathing machine. I told her to keep it.
Dwight pleaded guilty in January. He received three years of probation and a court order to repay the rest, and he lost his job on Highway 49 as soon as his employer heard. The family court ordered child support for the boy, paid on time every month, which is more than Dwight ever did on his own.
Charlene filed for divorce the following week. She moved back into her old room at my house for a while. We did not say much. She slept for two days. When she woke, she asked if she could sit in the kitchen while I made biscuits, the way she did when she was seven. A mother never stops being a place where a grown child can rest.
In March I drove to Mobile with Charlene to a small playground by the water. A thin boy with a gap in his teeth ran up and asked if we wanted to see his scooter. Charlene knelt on the sidewalk and told him it was the fastest scooter she had ever seen. He was not to blame for anything. He just wanted somebody to look.
Tammy told me the boy had asked once why his grandpa Otis sent a Christmas card every year with a five-dollar bill inside. I laughed out loud, right there on the sidewalk. Otis had never missed a December, not even when he was sick. He did all of it quietly, with an envelope and a stamp.
Geraldine came by my house the Sunday after with a plate of her pound cake. She told me that the billing office in Jackson had started a small fund for families who have no insurance and a sick child, and that she had named it for Otis. I sat on my porch with that cake and cried the good kind of tears.
I keep the bank slip in the Folgers can behind the frozen peas, along with the guarantor sheet, and now a Christmas card in the handwriting of Otis. On Sundays I sit in the third row at Main Street Baptist and sing the old hymns, and when the congregation says amen, I say it too, a little louder than before.
