PART 2: Ada Pruitt Stood Up
“Terri,” Ada said. “Come here.”
I didn’t move. My hands were full of a paper napkin I’d been folding and unfolding for ten minutes.
“Terri Dawes,” she said. “Come stand by me.”
“Mama, sit down,” Brenda said again. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Sit down yourself, Brenda Louise.”
Brenda sat down. She sat down fast, the way a woman sits down when her mother uses her whole name in front of twenty people.
Ada shifted her grip on the walker. Her knuckles were white on the handles.
“I want everybody to hear me,” she said. “Because everybody heard her.”
Nobody moved. A woman three chairs over set her plate down on the floor so it wouldn’t rattle.
“I was in my kitchen the night you went next door,” Ada said. “I heard you through my own wall. I heard Terri count that money out on her table.”
Brenda said, “Mama.”
“And then I heard you come home. You hung your coat on the hook and you said, ‘She’ll never ask.’ You said it right there by my stove.”
Somebody’s cup went over. Nobody picked it up.
“I said, Brenda, that money is for Terri and Walt to go to the river. And you said, ‘She’s got more.'”
Ada stopped and got her breath. Her chest made a little whistling sound.
“The furnace man was out in March to do my thermostat. I asked him a question while he was under my sink. He told me what that furnace cost.”
She looked at her daughter.
“Two hundred and forty dollars, parts and the visit.”
Kayla’s mother put her hand on the back of a chair.
“Two hundred and forty,” Ada said again. “Out of nineteen hundred.”
“Mama, that’s not—”
“And I know what’s under that blue tarp in your side yard. I know when it got there. I’ve looked at it every morning from my own porch steps.”
Brenda didn’t say anything else.
I got up out of my chair. My knees felt like they were packed with sand.
I walked down the aisle between the folding chairs, all the way back to the gift table, and I stood next to Ada Pruitt. I put my hand on the handle of her walker so she wouldn’t have to hold it by herself.
Ada nodded once, like she’d been waiting for me to get there.
Then I turned around and looked at the room.
“I want to say one thing in front of these women,” I said, “because you said it in front of these women.”
Brenda was looking at her hands.
“You will not come on my porch again until you’ve paid back every dollar. That’s the first thing.”
She nodded, still looking down.
“Second thing. I’ll be at your mother’s house Tuesday morning at eight-forty, same as always. That has nothing to do with you.”
I felt Ada’s hand close over mine on the handle.
“That’s all I’ve got,” I said.
Then somebody moved behind me.
Danny came down between the chairs with his arms uncrossed. He’s thirty-one years old and six feet tall, and he still walks like the kid who used to leave his cleats in the hall.
He stood on the other side of Ada and put his hand on my shoulder.
“When I was eleven,” he said, “I had a science project due Monday. A volcano. She sat up with me till one in the morning cutting cardboard, and she had to be at work at six.”
He looked at Brenda Pruitt.
“That’s the substitute.”
*
Brenda came back to me about ten minutes later, while I was wrapping the leftover deviled eggs in foil.
“Terri,” she said. “I’m sorry if what I said came out wrong.”
I kept folding the foil over the plate.
“That’s not an apology,” I said.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Nineteen hundred dollars,” I said. “And a real sentence. You can start with either one.”
She left then.
Danny carried the punch bowl out to the car for me and stacked the folding chairs with the pastor while I walked Ada out to mine. I folded her walker and put it in the back the way I’ve done twenty-six times.
She got in and put her seatbelt on and sat there a minute.
“You knew,” she said.
“I knew about the camper,” I said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner. I was ashamed of my own child.”
I started the car. We drove most of the way to her house without saying anything.
“Tuesday at eight-forty,” she said, when I pulled in.
“Tuesday at eight-forty.”
*
Walt was on the porch when I got home, with his boots off and his coffee gone cold.
He asked how the shower went. I told him.
He sat there a long time looking at the yard.
“I should have been there,” he said.
“It was a baby shower.”
“That’s not why.”
I let him have that one.
Kayla called that night while I was doing the dishes. She didn’t say hello.
“You’re Mama Terri in this house,” she said. “You’re putting that on a blanket for June.”
“I’ve already started it,” I said.
*
The first Sunday, nothing came.
The second Sunday I looked out the window and Ada Pruitt was coming up the sidewalk with her walker, one step at a time, over the crack in the walk she always complains about.
She had a ziplock bag with money in it. Ones and fives.
“She didn’t,” Ada said. “I did.”
I stood there holding that bag.
“Ada, this isn’t on you.”
“It’s on my house.”
She turned the walker around and went home before I could say anything else.
Every second Sunday after that, it was the same. Ada came up the sidewalk with a ziplock bag. Always ones and fives, never a twenty.
One time I asked her why the small bills.
She said, “Because it hurts more.”
That April the blue tarp came off the camper. Walt came in from getting the mail and said there was a hand-lettered sign on it, for sale.
Two weeks later it was gone out of the side yard. The grass under it had gone yellow.
It was about ten weeks after the shower when Brenda came up my walk. She stopped at the bottom step and didn’t come up onto the porch. I had a bucket of soapy water and my mother’s ivy plate, and I kept washing it.
“I wanted people to look at me the way they look at you,” she said. “That’s the whole reason. I said that thing because it was the thing that would hurt you most, and I knew it when I said it.”
I put the plate down.
“Say it.”
“I’m sorry, Terri. I said something ugly about you to a room full of people, and I did it on purpose.”
I looked at her for a long time. She didn’t look away.
“I’ll believe you when I see you do it,” I said.
Then I picked the plate back up.
*
In the second week of April, Ada came up the sidewalk with a ziplock bag and a Coke from the machine at the heart clinic, which she’d carried in her walker basket the whole way, warm by then.
“Nineteen hundred even,” she said. “I counted it twice.”
I put the money in the flour tin on top of the fridge. It’s still there. We’ll use it for the river.
I sat down with her on the porch because her hips were bothering her and she wanted to rest before the walk back.
“He’s a good boy,” Ada said. “That Danny.”
“He is.”
“You did that.”
I didn’t argue with her. Twenty years of not arguing does a lot for a person.
*
Six weeks later, Danny and Kayla had us over for Sunday dinner.
Kayla put the deviled eggs on the table on my mother’s ivy plate, the one with the chip on the edge.
I started for the chair by the kitchen door, the way I always do, so I can get up for things.
Danny put his hand on the back of a different chair, at the head of the table.
“Not that one tonight, Mama. Sit here.”
So I sat down.
The chair by the kitchen door stayed empty the whole meal.
Nobody once had to get up for anything.