The Brooch That Named The Thief

Who I Am and Who Edwin Was To Me

My name is Billie Harmon, though almost nobody outside my own family has called me that in years. Around Pruett I’ve been Mrs. Harmon since I started teaching fourth grade at the elementary school on the east side of town, back before my hair went the color it is now, and I answered to that name for thirty one years until I retired and started keeping the books part time for the feed store instead, mostly so I’d have somewhere to be on weekday mornings.

My husband passed eleven years ago, a tractor accident on his brother’s place that I still can’t make myself describe in much detail, and since then it has been just me in this house, with Edgar visiting on Sundays and holidays and, before his wedding, most Friday nights when the high school played at home and half the town packed the stadium lights like it was the only thing happening in the state.

Edwin is four years older than I am, and for most of my childhood he was the person I trusted before I trusted anybody else, including, if I’m honest, our own parents some years. He taught me to drive on the county road behind our mother’s place before I had a license, covered for me exactly once when I snuck out to a dance I wasn’t allowed to attend, and stood up for me at my own wedding when our father wasn’t well enough to walk me down the aisle.

That history matters here, because it’s the reason none of us thought to question him, not once, in nineteen years. You don’t suspect the brother who taught you to drive. You suspect the woman you hired to watch your dying mother, because it’s easier, and because some ugly part of small town thinking assumes hired help is disposable in a way family never is. I’ve had to sit with that ugliness in myself since all of this came out, and it hasn’t been comfortable.