The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

And because I was ashamed, I told nobody. I had been about to sign, and I could not say that out loud.

So I kept his name and his number to myself, and I said nothing to the other women on my street, not one of whom had been sat with.

Bettylou signed in March. Dorcas Whitlatch signed in April, Clarabel Rinehart in May, Vesta Kimbrough in July, and Pauline Oberg in August. In September it was Edna Mae Dupree, who had been my Sunday school teacher.

It was Edna Mae who broke it open. She stopped me in the church parking lot three weeks after her closing, with her purse held against her stomach like a shield.

“Laverne,” she said, “I got thirty-five thousand dollars for the house. Was that a lot?”

She asked it the way you ask a doctor whether a spot is anything. I understood that she had been wondering for three weeks, and that nobody had been willing to tell her the truth, including me.

I told her the true number, a hundred and seven thousand, and I will carry the look on her face to my grave.

The next morning I drove to the county courthouse and asked the girl at the recorder’s window for every deed filed in the past year to a company called Penhallow Property Group.

She printed six. I sat in my Buick in the parking lot and read them one at a time, and the transfer sheet stapled to the back of each gave the price he had paid.

Two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars, all told. I added it on the back of an envelope. Then I added what I knew those six houses were worth, because I had walked through most of them, and I wrote that underneath.

Seven hundred and fifty-three thousand. The difference was five hundred and sixteen thousand dollars, and it had come out of the pockets of six widows in seven months.

Not one of those deeds was illegal. I read them all twice, looking for the lie. He had told none I could prove.

Every paper was signed, every woman had been given time to think if you counted a pound cake as time, and every price was labeled an offer.

On a Sunday in late September, I went across the street and laid the six deeds on Aldene’s dining room table, beside her Bible and a stack of church bulletins. I had finally decided I owed her the truth.

I told her about January. The cake, the pen, the furnace clicking in my head. I told her I should have spoken in March, and that it was my fault.

She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Laverne, I taught eight grades in one room for thirty-four years. Do you know what I learned about people who do wrong?”

I said I did not.

“Most of them are counting on nobody knowing the answer to the question,” she said.

“You know the answer. You have always known it. You just never thought anybody needed you to say it.” She put her glasses back on. “So say it. To everybody. Before he gets to the next one.”

I sat down at the table with a ruler and a stack of index cards, the heavy five-by-eight kind I used to print for open houses. By midnight I had the card.