That was harder on her than a cross word would have been. I could see it on her face.
If somebody had lit into her, she’d have had something to stand up against. Instead she had to sit there and be passed the butter by the very people she’d sent a bill to. In front of a hundred and forty neighbors who all knew about that envelope by then.
About halfway through supper, she set her fork down.
“Ray,” she said. Low. “I expect you saw what I sent.”
“I did.”
“I put that cruise on my own credit card. Sixty-nine hundred dollars. It sails Monday out of Galveston, and they won’t give back a dime this close.” Her voice had a shake in it that she was working hard to hold down. “I don’t have that, Ray. I have never in my life carried a balance. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Daddy picked up a roll and buttered it. He took his time.
“Lorna, I’m going to say this one time,” he said. “And then I’m not going to say it again. Not tonight. Not ever.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He’s never needed to.
“A supper got eaten last night by thirty-eight people, and you and I were two of them. A boat’s going to sail Monday whether anybody’s on it or not. My girl didn’t order either one. And she didn’t cancel either one. You’ve brought it to the wrong house.”
Lorna looked down at her plate.
“I’ve got sixty-four hundred dollars in this room myself,” Daddy said, more gently now. “I’m not sending anybody an envelope. I’m sitting here watching Harold Dawson go back for thirds. I figure I got my money’s worth.”
He set the buttered roll on her bread plate.
That was the last time I ever heard anybody speak of the nine thousand dollars.
A little later, Jeff came up behind my chair and crouched down next to me, the way you’d do to talk to somebody at a ball game.
“He texted me again,” he said. “You want to know or not?”
I thought about it. “Is it short?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
Jeff read it off his phone. Derrick had left the lake and driven south down Highway 169 to their cousin’s place in Tulsa. He said he’d known since spring that he didn’t want to get married. He kept thinking the feeling would pass. And every week it got harder to say out loud, until that morning it was just easier to drive.
That was the whole reason.
There was no other woman. There was no big secret. There was just a man who was too scared to have one hard conversation back in April.
“Okay,” I said.
“You want me to say anything back?”
“Tell him his mother’s here. And she’s eating.”
Jeff almost smiled. “That’ll scare him worse than anything.”
“I’m not trying to scare him,” I said. “I just think he ought to know where she is.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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