Susan wiped the damp soil from her gardening gloves, staring in shock at the object resting in her palm.
She was a 68-year-old retired teacher, spending her Saturday planting tulips near the tall wooden fence that separated her yard from her neighbor, Agnes. As Susan’s trowel dug deep into the earth, it struck something metallic. She had unearthed a small, tarnished silver wedding band.
Susan’s breath caught in her throat. She didn’t need to clean the dirt out of the inner band to know what the inscription said. She knew the exact date and the initials carved into the silver, because it was her mother’s wedding ring – a ring her mother claimed she lost in the ocean on a family vacation thirty years before she died.
Susan stood up, her heart pounding, and looked over the fence at Agnes, who was quietly sipping tea on her back patio. Agnes had been Susan’s mother’s best friend since childhood.
Clutching the ring, Susan walked around the fence and stepped onto Agnes’s patio. She held out her hand, the silver band gleaming in the sunlight.
“Why was my mother’s ring buried in your garden, Agnes?” Susan asked, her voice trembling.
Agnes slowly set her teacup down on the glass table. She didn’t look surprised. She looked deeply, profoundly exhausted.
“Because she didn’t lose it in the ocean, Susan,” Agnes whispered, staring at the ring. “She took it off the night she found out who your father actually was.”
Susan Had the Wrong Man in Mind
The first name out of Susan’s mouth was Frank.
She didn’t plan it. It just came out, the way a wrong answer comes out of a kid who’s been dreading the question all period.
“Was it Frank? Agnes. Was it your Frank?”
Agnes laughed. One short bark, and then she put her hand flat on her chest like the laugh had hurt something on the way up.
“God, no,” she said. “I wish. Lord, honey, I wish it was that.”
Susan didn’t know what to do with that. She stood there with dirt ground into the knees of her jeans and the ring in her fist.
Agnes hooked the other patio chair with her slipper and dragged it out. It screeched on the concrete. “Sit down. I’m eighty-four. I’m not doing this looking up at you.”
So Susan sat.
Agnes turned her teacup a quarter turn on the saucer. Then another quarter. She’d done that for as long as Susan could remember: at church suppers, at Mom’s kitchen table, at the funeral home in 2010 with a Styrofoam cup of decaf she never drank.
“She came over at two in the morning,” Agnes said. “October 1980. In her nightgown and your daddy’s barn coat. Barefoot. She walked straight across the wet grass and I remember her feet were green up to the ankles.”
“Mom did.”
“She had a piece of paper in one hand and that ring in the other. Put them both down on my kitchen table and she said, ‘Aggie, read this and tell me I’m wrong.'”
Agnes reached into the pocket of her cardigan.
What came out was a square of paper folded so many times the creases had gone brown and soft, almost like cloth. Agnes didn’t unfold it. She slid it across the glass with two fingers.
Susan opened it.
Pink carbon copy. The kind of invoice book every garage in the county used to have. DUFFY’S AUTO BODY, RT. 30, GASTON CO. Date: 5/17/69. Customer: W. Hensley. Vehicle: ’64 Buick LeSabre. Then a list in block capitals. FRONT GRILLE, REPLACE. DRIVER HEADLAMP & BEZEL, REPLACE. HOOD, PULL & REFINISH. Paid: CASH. And at the bottom, in somebody’s slanty ballpoint:
Rush job. Cust. says hit deer.
Susan read it twice. Thirty-one years of fourth grade and her eyes still did the same thing with any page put in front of her: hunted for the mistake. Wrong date. Wrong name. A misspelling she could circle.
There wasn’t one.
May 17, 1969.
Everybody who lived on Pell Street that year knew the date before it.
The Evening Susan Was on the Phone
Danny Burke was six years old.
He had a red Schwinn with a banana seat that was too big for him and he rode it standing up because his feet didn’t reach the pedals when he sat. He called Susan “Soo-Soo.” He ate paste. Not as a dare, just because he liked it.
On May 16, 1969, a Friday, Agnes had asked thirteen-year-old Susan to walk Danny home from the Kowalskis’ at seven o’clock. Three houses down and across Pell Street, where it curved and there was no sidewalk.
At seven o’clock Susan was in the upstairs hallway with the phone cord stretched all the way into the linen closet, talking to Gary Pruitt about whether Gary Pruitt liked her.
He didn’t, it turned out. Not that it matters.
At 7:20 Mrs. Kowalski sent Danny home on his bike by himself because it was still light out and it was only three houses.
At 7:25 somebody came around the curve on Pell Street too fast.
They found the Schwinn in the ditch. They found Danny in the Mahoneys’ hedge. The car never stopped. Nobody saw the plate. Gaston County put it in the paper for a week and then put it in a drawer.
Susan had carried that phone call for fifty-five years. She’d carried it into her wedding and into the delivery room with Emily and into every single classroom where some six-year-old’s little brother rode a bike. She’d never told anybody the whole thing. Not her husband. Not her mother.
Agnes knew. Agnes had always known.
“You were thirteen,” Agnes said now, watching her face. “I want you to hear me say that before the rest of it. You were a child on the telephone.”
Susan couldn’t answer. She was looking at the pink paper. Rush job.
She remembered the Buick.
She hadn’t thought about that car in decades and suddenly she could see it, sitting in the driveway the next week with new chrome across the front. She’d noticed because the old grille had a chip in it on the left side that looked like a missing tooth, and the new one didn’t. She’d said at dinner, “The car’s smiling different,” and her father had laughed and said he’d hit a deer out on Route 9 and his buddy fixed it up cheap.
Her father had cried at Danny’s funeral. She remembered that too. Walt Hensley, who didn’t cry at his own mother’s funeral, standing in the back of First Methodist with his hat in both hands and his face just gone.
She’d thought it was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen a grown man do.
He sold the Buick that July.
What Her Mother Found in the Glove Box
“She was cleaning out his tackle box,” Agnes said. “That’s the stupid part. He’d asked her to find him a lure. And there it was, in the lid tray, folded up under the sinkers. Eleven years. He kept it eleven years.”
“Why would he keep it?”
Agnes shrugged. Her shoulders went up and down like it cost her something. “Why does anybody keep anything. Your mother thought he wanted to get caught. I thought he forgot it was there. We argued about it for years, actually. Never settled it.”
Somewhere down the block a leaf blower started up, quit, started again.
“She woke him up,” Agnes went on. “Stood at the foot of the bed with the light on and held it up. She told me he didn’t even ask what it was. He just sat up and put his face in his hands and said, ‘I thought it was a dog, Marj. I swear to God I thought it was a dog.'”
Susan’s hands had gone cold. Not shaking. Just cold, like she’d been holding them in the hose water.
“And then he said he went back. He said he turned around at the Esso and drove back and by the time he got there there were already people in the road and he heard Frank yelling, and he just. Kept going.” Agnes turned the teacup. “Went home. Washed his hands. Ate supper with you.”
Susan tried to remember that supper. She couldn’t. It was just a Friday.
“So she pulled that ring off right there in the bedroom,” Agnes said, “and walked out of the house and came across the grass to me.”
Why Nobody Called the Police
“Okay,” Susan said. “Okay. So why didn’t you call somebody?”
It came out sharper than she meant. Teacher voice. Agnes didn’t flinch.
“Your mother wanted to. She had the phone in her hand. In my kitchen. Dialing.”
“And?”
“And I took it away from her.”
Susan looked at her.
Agnes was a small woman now. She’d never been big, but she’d been solid once, the kind of woman who carried a casserole in each hand to a funeral and still got the door. Now her wrists looked like you could snap them like breadsticks. She had a wind chime made of bent spoons hanging off the gutter behind her and it clanked once in a gust and stopped.
“Frank was three years in the ground by then,” Agnes said. “Heart. Danny was eleven years gone. You’d just had Emily that summer, you remember, and you were living in that apartment over the hardware store with no air conditioning. Walt was paying your rent. Did you know that?”
Susan hadn’t known that.
“If your mother called, Walt goes to prison. Your mother loses the house, because she never worked a day outside it. You lose your rent. The whole street finds out. And I lose.” She stopped. Started again. “I lose Marjorie. Because she’d have moved. She’d have gone to her sister’s in Ohio. She’d have had to. She couldn’t have stayed on this street as the wife of the man who did that.”
“So you let him get away with it.”
“No,” Agnes said.
She picked up the teacup. Drank. Set it down. Turned it.
“I made her stay with him.”
Seven Feet of Pine
Agnes told the rest of it without looking up from the cup.
They went out together that same night, both of them in their nightgowns, Agnes with a flashlight and Marjorie with Frank’s old garden spade. They dug a hole under the rosebush Frank had planted for Danny the summer after, a pink climber that never climbed much. Marjorie dropped the ring in. Agnes covered it.
“Your mother said it was the only part of her marriage she could stand to give back,” Agnes said. “I didn’t argue. It was two in the morning. It sounded right at two in the morning.”
The next summer the Hensleys went to Myrtle Beach for a week, and Marjorie came home and told everybody the ring slid off in the surf. Too much sunscreen. Fingers thinner than she thought. She told it so many times it got funny, and people laughed, and Susan laughed too, and her father would go out to the garage while she told it.
“And here’s what I asked her for,” Agnes said. “Here’s the only thing I asked. I said, Marjorie, you stay in that house. You stay married to him. You keep making his supper. And he lives right here, next to me, for the rest of his life. Every time he takes the trash out. Every time he mows. Every Christmas when I bring over the fruitcake nobody eats. I wanted him to have to look at me.”
Susan didn’t say anything.
“That was mine,” Agnes said. “That was all I ever got. I’m not sorry about it.”
The fence went up in April of 1981. Seven feet, solid pine, no gaps. Susan remembered her father building it by himself over three weekends and her mother telling people Walt just liked his privacy. She’d thought it was rude. She’d thought, he’s going to hurt Agnes’s feelings.
“He put it two feet over the line,” Agnes said. “On my side. Right over where that rosebush was. Ripped the bush out to set the post.”
“Did he know?”
“I don’t know. Your mother never told him where she put it. I didn’t say a word about the line. I figured he could have the two feet.” She almost smiled. “I knew what was in them.”
The Coffee Can
Agnes got up then, which took a while.
She went inside through the sliding door and Susan could hear her moving around in there, a cabinet, a drawer, something knocked over and not picked up. Susan sat on the patio with the ring and the pink receipt and looked at the back of her own fence. From this side the boards were gray. She’d never seen this side of them. Not in forty-three years.
Agnes came back carrying a Folgers can. The big one, the old red kind with the metal lid, rust around the rim.
She set it on the glass table and pried the lid off with her thumbnail.
Envelopes. White ones, the cheap kind from the drugstore. Stacked on edge, packed in tight.
“Every May sixteenth,” Agnes said. “In my mailbox. 1981 till 1998. No name on them, but who else.”
Susan pulled one out. Unsealed. Inside, five one-hundred-dollar bills, old ones, the small portraits. And a slip of paper torn off a notepad. Just one word, in her father’s square carpenter’s print. She knew that print. It was on every birthday card she’d ever gotten.
Sorry.
She pulled out another. Same five bills. Same slip.
Sorry.
“Eighteen of them,” Agnes said. “Nine thousand dollars. I never spent a dime. I thought about burning it. Then I thought about giving it to the church. Then I thought, no, I’ll keep it, because if I spend it, it means something got paid for.”
Susan put the envelope back where it came from, in the right order, because it seemed like the order mattered.
Her father had died in March of 1999. Lung cancer, fast. The last envelope would’ve been the May before. He’d have already known he was sick.
“Did Mom know about these?”
“I never told her,” Agnes said. “I figured she had enough.”
Six Bulbs Left
They sat there a long time. The leaf blower had stopped. A mourning dove was doing its one note over and over in the Mahoneys’ maple, the same maple, Susan realized, that used to stand over the hedge.
“So what are you going to do,” Agnes said. Not really a question. More like someone checking the time.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s nobody left to arrest. You know that. Your father’s dead. Your mother’s dead. Frank’s dead. I’m next, probably by Christmas if my cardiologist knows anything.” She pushed the coffee can an inch toward Susan. “You can put that ring back where you found it. Or you can wear it. Or you can throw it in the actual ocean, I don’t care. It’s yours now. It was always going to be yours. I just thought I’d be dead first.”
Susan stood up. Her right knee popped. She left the coffee can where it was.
She took the receipt.
She walked around the end of the fence, the long way, past her own garbage cans and the hose reel she kept meaning to replace, and back to the little trench along the boards. Her trowel was lying where she’d dropped it. The bag of bulbs was tipped over on its side. Six left. Darwin hybrids, red, $14.99 at the Lowe’s on Route 30.
The hole was still open.
She knelt down. She could see the shape in the dirt where the ring had been, a little curved dent, like a fingernail mark. She held the ring over it.
Then she put the ring in her shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket.
She sat back on her heels and took out her phone and looked up the number for the Gaston County Sheriff’s Office, non-emergency. There was a page on their website she’d found once, years ago, at two in the morning, and never told anybody about either. Unsolved Cases. A grainy school picture. A cowlick. A red bike mentioned in the second paragraph.
Daniel Francis Burke, 6. Status: Open.
It rang four times.
On the fifth, a woman picked up, bored, chewing something, and said, “Sheriff’s office, how can I help you.”
Susan looked at the gray side of the fence, where Agnes was, and said, “I’d like to close a file.”
Would you have called? I keep going back and forth.
For more unsettling secrets hiding close to home, read Helen’s discovery of a letter from her late husband and the storm-night mystery of the man at the end of Elm Street. You can also follow an 82-year-old widow’s fight against an eviction notice.
