“Her daddy’s been dead forty-seven years,” my brother said. And then, with the cottonwood moving in the window behind him, he said the clearest thing I have heard a man say. “A promise to a dead man is for the living, Clem. You tell her.”
I wrote Marcene a check on the fifteenth of October, fifty dollars, with 1 of 52 on the line. It was the only thing I could think of. I put it in her mailbox before light and walked home with my hands in my pockets. Fifty-two months, and I will be seventy-eight. I intend to be alive for all of them.
Some nights that month I went out and stood at the end of my own lane in the cold, with my hand on the mailbox, and looked down the road at her kitchen light. I could not tell you how long. The light would go off around nine, and I would go in.
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I went to church on the eighteenth. I sat in the last pew where I could see the back of her head. When they got to the last hymn, my legs made a decision for me, and I left. I could not stand to hear her sing.
A week ago Wednesday I went to see Cora Dunstan. She was stocking the glove rack, and she did not turn around. I said, “Cora, I need to ask you something.”
“Ask.”
“Does she hate me?”
Cora put down the gloves. She is sixty-three years old and I have known her since she married into that store in 1985, and she gave me the look I think she had been saving for a month.
“Marcene Spurlock does not hate you, Clem,” she said. “That’s what’s wrong. A woman who hates you is finished with you. She walked in here with a plate. People do not carry food to a man they are finished with. She did that so you’d have to sit there and be fed by her one more time, in front of everybody, and know what you’d said.”
“I know what I said.”
“Then say the rest of it,” Cora said. “Whatever the rest of it is. You’ve got one, I can see it on you. You’ve had it on you for forty years.”