The morning Deacon Pruitt stood up in front of two hundred people at Grace Tabernacle to tell them his wife was losing her marbles, I kept my hands folded in my lap so hard my knuckles turned the color of skim milk. Thirty years in internal medicine teaches you how to spot a lie by the cadence of a throat-clearing, but Deacon didn’t clear his throat. He just waited for the third hymn to wind down, walked right up to the mahogany pulpit where Pastor Vance kept his water pitcher, and let out a sigh that sounded like a dry pump.
He said Odessa was slipping. He said she forgot where she put the car keys. He said she tried to boil eggs in an empty aluminum pot on Tuesday and nearly burned the kitchen down to the sills. Sumter is the kind of town where people nod before you even finish your sentence, and by the time Deacon got to the part about making the hardest decision a husband could make, half the women in the fourth row were reaching for their pocket packs of Kleenex.
I sat four rows back with my blood pressure kit in my leather tote, and I wanted to throw my heavy brass pen right between his shoulder blades.
Odessa is seventy-one years old and she does the Sunday Times crossword in ink without so much as scratching out a letter. She ran the books for Pruitt Hardware for thirty years before they sold the building to the tractor supply outfit, and she still balances her checkbook to the penny while I am off by four dollars every single month.
Her mind was not slipping. Her mind was sharper than a surgical blade, which was precisely why Deacon had a problem on his hands.
The hardware store didn’t sell for forty thousand dollars the way Deacon told the Lions Club over coffee at the diner. It brought in nearly three hundred thousand clear after taxes, and because Odessa’s daddy had left her that brick commercial lot back in eighty-four, the bulk of that money sat in an account with just her name on the signature card. Deacon had spent thirty-three years acting like the king of Sumter County, but he didn’t own the vault.
Three weeks earlier, Odessa had shown up at my office on a Tuesday afternoon looking like she’d been dragged behind a tractor. She didn’t want a checkup for her heart or her joints. She wanted me to test her brain because Deacon had started leaving yellow legal pads on the kitchen island with lists of things she supposedly forgot to do.
I ran her through every cognitive screen we use for the university studies, plus the full panel of bloodwork and a head scan down at the county clinic. She scored a twenty-nine out of thirty, and the one point she missed was because she argued with me about whether a turnip was a root vegetable or a tuber.
I printed out the results on heavy cream stationery with my letterhead across the top and signed it with my license number right beneath.
Odessa put that paper in her purse behind her driver’s license and told me not to say a word to Deacon yet because she wanted to see how far he would dig his own hole. I should have told her right then that men like Deacon don’t dig holes for themselves; they dig them for the women standing next to them.
After the church service let out, the air outside was damp and smelled like wet pine needles from the gully behind the fellowship hall.
Deacon was standing by the side door taking handshakes and pats on the shoulder from the deacons, looking every bit the martyr in his seersucker suit. I didn’t wait for him. I took Odessa by the elbow and guided her past the Dodge Ram straight to my sedan, opened the passenger door, and pushed her inside before she could start fretting about Sunday potluck.
“He’s setting me up for the home, isn’t he,” she said before I even turned the ignition. Her voice didn’t shake. That was the thing about Odessa. She didn’t cry when she was mad; she just got very quiet and her eyes went small like beads of lead shot.
“He’s trying to get power of attorney before the quarter closes,” I said, putting the gearshift into reverse. “He tried to move three blocks of stock out of the joint fund last Tuesday and the bank manager called me because my name is on your secondary emergency line from when your hip acted up.”
Odessa looked out the side window at the church bell tower where the pigeons were staging a fight over a bit of crust. “He thinks he’s clever because he bought that time-share down in Myrtle Beach behind my back and needs twenty thousand to clear the title before the summer assessment hits.”
“It’s more than twenty thousand, Odessa. The bank manager mentioned a woman named Charlene from the commercial branch.”
The silence in the car got thick enough to slice with a butter knife. Odessa didn’t look surprised. She just reached into her handbag, pulled out her tortoiseshell glasses, and slid them onto the bridge of her nose with a little click.
“Drive me down to the fruit stand by the county line,” she said. “I need to make a call where nobody from the choir can see the back of my head.”
She didn’t wait for me to agree. She pulled her phone out of the leather pouch, tapped three times on the screen with a fingernail that still had old pink polish on the tip, and held the receiver to her ear while the engine ticked over in the gravel lot.
“Sharon?” she said, her voice dropping into that cool, low register she used when she was firing a clerk at the hardware store for skimming the register. “It’s Odessa Pruitt. I have my cousin the doctor sitting right here in the front seat, and we have the papers from the third-floor clinic. You tell that little girl Charlene down at window four that her signature on the second mortgage transfer is going to look real interesting once the state banking board sees the security footage from Tuesday night.”
I watched the side of her face in the rearview mirror. Thirty-three years of folding her husband’s shirts and listening to him tell the Rotary Club how she couldn’t manage a checkbook had burned away in about five seconds, leaving behind the girl whose daddy had owned half the timber rights between here and the river.
She listened for about twenty seconds, nodding once like she was approving an invoice for roofing nails.
“No, Sharon, we aren’t waiting until Tuesday,” Odessa said, and for the first time all morning, the corner of her mouth twitched up into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Deacon is currently standing by the peach basket outside Grace Tabernacle telling everybody I don’t know my own middle name. Let’s give him something real to pray about before the sun goes down.”
