“I told him I was his wife. He says, no, ma’am, my wife’s name is Sue.” My mother’s name. “And I thought, I’m sixty-three. I cook for forty children a day on my feet. I have a sister in Fort Myers who has a spare room.”
“I thought, I could take the cattle money and go, and let the county have the rest, and nobody would be hurt, because Eldon wouldn’t know the difference.”
“He’d know the difference.”
“Would he?”
I looked at her, and I want to be fair. I looked at her a long time. I saw a worn-out woman in a Sunday blouse, scared of a number on a bill. She wasn’t a monster. She’d been drowning for three years and nobody threw her a rope.
But I also saw the beauty-shop hair. And the lie she’d told Norbert Gaylord over a fence. And the day she picked to do it, when I was five hundred miles away, and the call she never made, and the way she’d looked at the clock instead of the ring.
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“You could have told me,” I said quietly. “You had my number. You could have said, Clint, I can’t pay for this. I’d have come home. Every cow in that pasture was worth more than the money, but Dad’s care was worth more than the cows.”
“I’d have sold half of them myself, to the penny, and put it in the right account with his name on it.”
She said nothing.
“You waited until I was gone,” I said. “That’s the part I can’t get around. You didn’t ask. You waited until nobody who’d say no was in the state.”
Her chin quivered. For a second I thought she’d say something sharp. But she only looked down at her purse, and then at the cows being loaded, black backs moving up the ramp one after another into Lyman’s trailer, and I saw her count them with her eyes. I think she’d never seen them all together before.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“I’m taking Dad’s cows home.”
“And me?”
“The house is Dad’s, and it’s yours to live in as long as he is. I’ll pay the light bill. But I’m not going to chase you, Sharla, and I’m not going to ask for what I can’t prove you took. The sale didn’t go through. There’s nothing to take.”
She nodded. She stood very still.
“The sister in Fort Myers,” I said. “Does she know about the money?”
A long pause. “I told her it’d be there Friday.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I’d already given her my word.” Her voice cracked. “I’d already told her I was coming.”
That’s the consequence, and I won’t dress it up. She lost the ninety-six thousand dollars she’d planned to start over on.
She lost it in front of three hundred people who had known her for nine years, who had eaten her pecan pies at the church supper, and who now, every one of them, knew exactly what she’d tried. Nobody shunned her. Nobody said a word. They just went quiet when she walked by.
I didn’t want to humiliate her. I didn’t want to chase her out of town. I wanted my father’s cattle to go back to his pasture, and I wanted them kept, and I wanted the barn to see it. All three of those happened. The rest of it, the how she lives with herself, that belongs to her.