Part 2: The Body Doesn’t Lie
Zach is thirty eight. He runs a body shop in Balch Springs called Pruitt Collision. Dwight helped him start it eleven years ago with money we’d saved, and Zach has worked himself half to death keeping it going. He’s a good boy. He always was. When he was eight, he handed over his whole allowance to a kid at school whose dog had been hit by a car, so the kid could buy a new puppy.
But since Dwight died, Zach had changed.
Right after the funeral, while I was still in a fog, he sat me down at the kitchen table.
“Mama, I’m going to handle your bank stuff for a while,” he said. “Just till you get your feet under you. Daddy’s insurance came through, and that’s a lot of money. Old people get scammed. I see it on the news every day.”
“I’m not old, Zachary.”
“You know what I mean.” He took my hand. “Just so you don’t get scammed, Mama. Please. Let me do this for you.”
So I let him. He set up my online banking. He kept the password. Whenever I needed to know something, I called him and he looked it up on his phone. I didn’t mind. Honestly, I was glad not to think about it. I’d done paperwork for thirty four years at the hospital. I’d had enough.
Zach first met Wendell at the end of August. He dropped by unannounced on a Sunday and found Wendell in my kitchen, drying dishes.
He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. He’s built like his daddy, thick through the chest, and when he folds his arms he fills the whole doorway.
“Who’s this?”
“Zach, this is Wendell Haskins. From my grief group. Wendell, this is my son.”
Wendell put down the dish towel and held out his big hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Zach. Your mama talks about you all the time.”
Zach stared at the hand a second too long before he shook it.
“Does she,” he said.
After that, Zach started coming to Sunday supper. Every single week.
He’d never come every week before. Not even when Dwight was alive. Once a month, maybe. On holidays. He was always so busy at the shop.
Now he turned up every Sunday at five o’clock sharp with his wife Jordyn and the grandkids, Kaylee and Brody. Kaylee is seven and Brody is four. I loved having them. I’d have loved it more if I hadn’t understood exactly why they were there.
Zach watched Wendell eat. That’s the only way I know to put it. He sat across the table and watched him eat as if he were counting the bites.
He asked questions. Lots of them.
“So where’d you say you worked, Wendell?”
“Trinity Valley Electric Co op. Thirty eight years.”
“And you’re retired now?”
“Two years.”
“Pension pretty good?”
“Zachary,” I said.
“What? I’m just making conversation.”
“It’s fine,” Wendell said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “It’s a decent pension. Enough for me.”
“Huh.” Zach cut his pork chop into small pieces. “And where do you live?”
“Out past Ferris.”
“Big place?”
“Little place.”
“Never seen it, though,” Zach said, and looked at me. “Have you, Mama?”
I didn’t answer. Wendell looked at his plate.
Across the table, Jordyn was looking at hers too. Jordyn is a quiet girl, a dental hygienist, sweet with the kids. Through the whole supper she barely lifted her eyes. When I went to the kitchen for the pie, she followed to help, and stood beside me at the counter cutting slices without a word.
Then she said, very quietly, “He seems really nice, Miss Winona.”
“He is.”
She nodded and kept cutting. Her hands trembled a little. I noticed. I thought she was nervous that Zach would make a scene. I didn’t think about it again.
I should have. Thirty four years in an ER, and I didn’t think about it again.
It went on that way for three weeks. Then, on the last Sunday in September, it all came apart.
Wendell had gone home early. He said he had something he needed to finish. The grandbabies were in the living room watching cartoons. Jordyn was helping me clear plates.
Zach leaned back in his chair. He had his daddy’s way of leaning back, one arm hooked over the chair.
“Where does he live, Mama? Really?”
“Out past Ferris, I think.”
“You think.” He laughed. “You think. You’ve been seeing this man for four months, and you’ve never been to his house?”
“He says it isn’t fit for company.”
“Mama.” He leaned forward. “For all you know, he’s got a wife out there.”
“He’s a widower. Ruth. She died of ALS. He talked about it in group.”
“He told you that. Anybody can say anything in a grief group.” Zach shook his head. “Mama, wake up. A man who won’t show you his house wants one thing, and it’s Daddy’s insurance.”
Jordyn set the stack of plates down on the counter. She didn’t turn around.
“He’s never asked me for a dime,” I said.
“Not yet.” Zach drew his phone from his pocket and tapped the screen. I saw the green logo appear. My bank. “I’m just making sure he’s not in your accounts.”
“Zachary, put that away.”
He didn’t look up. He was scrolling.
“I’m serious, Mama. Has he asked to borrow your card? Has he asked about your Social Security number? Has he asked you to sign anything?”
My face went hot. I felt it climb up my neck, all the way into my ears.
I was being discussed like a child. In my own kitchen. In front of my grandbabies, who had gone quiet in the living room and were peeking around the door.
“Put that phone away, Zachary,” I said. “Right now.”
He didn’t.
He kept scrolling. Then he stopped, and stared at something on the screen for a long second. His jaw tightened.
Then he laid the phone face down on the table.
“Everything looks fine,” he said. “For now.”
That Tuesday, my daughter Megan called from Longview.
Megan is thirty five. She’s a school counselor. She has two little girls and a husband who sells insurance. She phones me on Tuesdays and Fridays, regular as a clock.
“Mama,” she said. “Zach called me. He’s real upset.”
I was standing in the kitchen. I dropped heavily onto the kitchen stool.
“About Wendell.”
“He says this man’s got you wrapped around his finger. He says he’s at your house every Sunday, sitting in Daddy’s chair.”
“He fell asleep in it one time.”
“Mama.” She sighed. “Zach says if you keep seeing him, he’s done bringing the kids.”
The kitchen went very quiet. I could hear the refrigerator hum. I could hear the clock over the stove.
“He said that?”
“He’s just scared. He doesn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Is that what you think too, honey?”
She took too long to answer.
“I think,” Megan said slowly, “that you’re lonely, Mama. And lonely people get taken. I see it all the time. Not just old people. Everybody. When you’re lonely, you see what you want to see.”
I said nothing for a long time. I looked through the kitchen doorway at Dwight’s recliner, on its little dusted island by the window.
“Mama? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’ve got to go, baby. I’ve got something on the stove.”
I didn’t have anything on the stove.
I barely slept that week.
At two in the morning I’d lie in the big bed Dwight and I bought in 1991 and listen to the house tick. The air conditioner cycling on and off. The ice maker dropping cubes. The porch light buzzing a little, the one Wendell fixed.
Maybe they were right.
I went over it and over it. Maybe I was just a lonely old woman being fooled by a nice man with a coffee cup. Maybe he’d watched me in that grief group and seen exactly what I was. A widow with a paid off house and a life insurance check. Maybe the porch light was just the first step. Maybe the two creams were just the first step.
I’d seen it happen. Lord knows I’d seen it happen. Old women coming into the ER with broken hips, and the “boyfriend” nowhere to be found when the bills came. Earl’s poor wife with her bottle of pills.
Then I’d think about those yellow knuckles.
The sawdust. The splinter. The way he’d dropped off in Dwight’s chair, out cold in ten seconds, like a man who’d been working twelve hours a day.
A man running a con doesn’t show up to supper too tired to eat. A man running a con doesn’t wash your dishes and ask where they go. A man running a con doesn’t ask three separate times what color your dead mother’s kitchen cabinets were.
If thirty four years in the ER taught me one thing above all, it’s this. When the story doesn’t match the body, you trust the body.
The story everybody was telling me said Wendell was a liar.
The body said he was exhausted, and covered in sawdust, and paint.
I’m a nurse. When something’s off, I go see for myself.
Back in July, Wendell had written his address on a paper napkin. “In case of emergency,” he’d said, and tucked it under the sugar bowl. I’d dropped it in my junk drawer and forgotten it.
On Thursday morning, I dug through that drawer. Rubber bands and twist ties and dead batteries and coupons for things I’d never buy. Under the old phone book, folded in half, I found it.
1412 County Road 664. Ferris, TX.
His handwriting. Straight block letters, like a ruler.
I put on my good blouse, the one with the little blue buttons. I put on my good shoes. I looked at myself in the hall mirror and thought, Winona, what in the world are you doing?
Then I got in my car.
It took forty minutes. The back roads out past Ferris wind through cotton fields and cattle and long stretches of nothing. My phone lay on the seat beside me with the map on it, and twice I took a wrong turn and had to back up on a gravel road.
I nearly turned around three times.
The first was at the gas station in Wilmer. I sat at the pump and thought, this is crazy. This is exactly the kind of thing a lonely, foolish old woman does.
The second was when I passed the sign for Ferris. I thought about Zach’s face at the table. You think. You’ve never been to his house.
The third was when I turned onto County Road 664, and I saw it.
A little white frame house with green shutters and a chain link fence. A big pecan tree in the front yard, so big its branches drooped over the roof. A tire swing hung from one of the low branches, old and faded, the rope gone gray.
His truck was parked out back by a metal shed.
But the garage door stood wide open. And a radio was playing country music inside.
I pulled over at the edge of the road and sat in my car with the engine running.
What if Zach was right? What if a woman came to that door? What if I got out and walked up that drive, and some lady in a housecoat stepped onto the porch and said, “Can I help you?”
My hands shook on the steering wheel. Not my knees this time. My hands.
I turned off the engine.
I got out anyway.
I walked up that gravel drive in my good shoes. The gravel crunched loud as gunshots. My knees complained with every step.
Nobody came out on the porch.
The garage smelled of fresh cut pine and paint and something else, something like turpentine. The radio sat on a workbench in the back, playing George Strait. There were sawhorses and a table saw and a stack of lumber against one wall. A shop vac. Paint cans, a lot of them, lined up neatly on a shelf.
And there was the ramp.
Long and wide, built of new lumber, running from the garage floor up to the door into the house. Gently sloped, the way you build them when you want somebody to roll up easy. Raw wood, sanded smooth. Not a splinter on it.
Rails on both sides. Nice and wide. At just the right height for a hand.
I put my hand on the rail. It fit my hand perfectly. I’m five foot three. My hand sat on that rail as if it had been made for it.
Because it was. I knew that, standing there. I knew it before I knew anything else.
I looked at the paint cans on the shelf and walked over to them. Most were primer. White semi gloss. A can of deck stain.
And four gallons of interior latex, with a color swatch taped to the lid. A little square of pale yellow.
The name printed under the swatch said: Buttercup.
I walked up the ramp.
I don’t remember deciding to. My feet simply did it. I put my hand on that rail and climbed that gentle slope in my good shoes, and my knees didn’t hurt at all. Not once. It was the easiest walk I’d taken in a year.
At the top, the door into the house stood open a crack. I pushed it.
It swung in onto a kitchen.
I stood in the doorway, and I couldn’t breathe.
The walls were buttercup yellow. Pale, like butter. Like the sun coming up.
The cabinets were white. Every single one. And on every cabinet door, a little glass knob.
The counters had been cut down. I could see it. They sat lower than any counter I’d ever seen, maybe six inches below standard, just the height you could reach from a chair. The bottom cabinets on one side had been removed entirely, leaving open space under the sink so a person in a wheelchair could roll right up and wash dishes. The doorway into the next room had been widened. I could see the fresh trim around it, still unpainted, and the new stretch of hardwood floor where the old wall had been.
There was a grab bar by the back door. Another by the stove.
And on the windowsill over the sink, in a little clay pot, sat a pink geranium. My mama grew pink geraniums. I’d told him that, too. I didn’t even remember telling him that.
I put my hand on the counter to steady myself.
That’s when I heard the back door open.
Wendell came in from the yard with a paint roller in one hand and a five gallon bucket in the other. He wore old overalls splattered all over with yellow and white. There was yellow paint on his cheek. Yellow paint in his gray hair.
He saw me and stopped dead in the doorway.
The bucket hit the floor. The paint roller clattered from his hand.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. George Strait was still playing out in the garage, faint through the door.
“Winnie,” he said finally. His voice came out cracked. “You… you weren’t supposed to see it yet.”
