Everybody in Mena had me down as the daughter who picked the Air Force over a DYING MAN.
Mama built that story for nine years, and she built it in the one room I’d have to walk back into someday: the church where Daddy sat on the same pew every Sunday of his life.
So the morning of his service, when I came in through the side door in my dress blues, the whole place turned around.
The looks I was ready for.
The talk behind hands, too.
Mama standing dead center on the red carpet with her hand up, I was not ready for.
Flat palm, arm straight out, like she was stopping a school bus.
“NOT IN THAT,” she said.
Nobody on either side of the aisle moved.
The flower stand by the flags still had an orange price sticker on one leg.
Daddy was Chief Master Sergeant Harlan Dunaway, retired, thirty-one years in. Half that room had flown with him, fished with him, or borrowed his bass boat and brought it back with the tank empty.
I missed his burial.
Mama’s version: I couldn’t be bothered.
Here’s mine.
Five weeks before he died, a truck bomb went off outside our clinic tent, and I woke up eleven days later at Walter Reed with a tube down my throat.
Mama got the call from my unit on day two.
She never told a soul.
“He wanted me in uniform,” I said.
Her mouth went thin.
“Your daddy’s service is not your parade, Tamara.”
My sister Bethany stood two steps behind her in a rose-colored dress, hands pressed together under her chin.
“Tammy got hurt?” she said. “Mama. Tammy got HURT?”
Mama didn’t turn around.
“Nine years you stayed gone,” she said, loud enough for the back rows. “He asked for you every night at the end.”
That one hit, because I’d lain awake in that ward picturing her saying exactly that.
He knew I’d tried.
Three times I put in for emergency leave after the hospice nurse started calling.
Three times my wing said no. We were the only surgical team for four hundred miles.
He never held it against me. The last thing he ever mailed me was a postcard with a catfish on it, and on the back, in his square capital letters:
Wear the blues, Tam. You paid for them.
I’d carried that postcard inside my jacket all the way from Maryland to Arkansas.
And I still almost walked back out.
Then somebody’s cane knocked against the end of a pew.
An old man near the front was getting to his feet, slow, one hand on the pew ahead of him.
Floyd Kimbrough. He’d flown cargo planes with Daddy out of Thailand in 1971 and called him Dune like it was a rank.
“Before anybody makes this lady take off one stitch of that uniform,” he said, “this room ought to hear what Harlan wrote down about it.”
The color went out of Mama.
“Floyd. Don’t.”
He looked straight at her.
“You’ve told it your way for nine years, Loretta.”
Then he reached into his suit coat and came out with a spiral notebook, the cheap kind with a green cover, bent into a curve from living in a man’s back pocket.
I knew that notebook. Daddy kept one going his whole life. Gas mileage, fish, what the dog ate.
“He handed me this at the hospice,” Floyd said. “Every call that came into that room, he logged it. Time, who, how long.”
He opened it and held it up toward the pews like a hymnal nobody could read from there.
“Tamara called FORTY-ONE times,” he said. “Bad line, most of them. He wrote that down too.”
Heads started turning toward Mama.
“And the day Harlan passed, those calls stopped for one reason.”
He let that sit.
“She was on a ventilator, and her mother had the number of the ward stuck to the fridge.”
Bethany put both hands over her mouth.
Mama said nothing at all.
Floyd thumbed to the last page with writing on it and read it out.
“‘If Tammy comes to my service in her blues, she stands in that aisle as long as she wants. She carried things over there this town couldn’t lift. Anybody tells my girl she don’t belong in that church ain’t taking my side. They’re spitting on it.'”
Not one person moved.
Then Bethany stepped out from behind Mama and came and stood at my elbow.
A man in a faded post cap got up from the aisle seat.
Then a woman two rows back.
In maybe ten seconds, every veteran in that church was on their feet.
No clapping.
Nobody needed any.
Mama turned and took in the room, pew by pew. Nine years of her story came apart and nobody had to raise their voice.
But Floyd wasn’t done.
He flipped the notebook over and opened the back cover.
“There’s a page taped in here.”
Mama’s head came around fast.
“FLOYD. PUT THAT AWAY.”
First time all morning, her voice shook.
Floyd looked at me, not her.
“Your daddy said this one only gets read if your mother tries to stop you in the aisle.”
I looked at Mama.
She had gone the color of the carnations.
Floyd worked the tape loose with his thumbnail and unfolded the page.
And the first line on it told me why my mother had spent nine years getting the whole town to believe I’d walked out on him.
The taped page
Floyd didn’t read that one out.
He held it across the aisle, and I took it with my left hand, the one that still won’t close all the way since Walter Reed.
Daddy’s square capitals. He’d pressed so hard the pen went through the paper in two places.
I NEVER SIGNED MILL CREEK OVER TO LORETTA. TAMMY IS THE ONLY ONE WHO SAW THE PAPER.
Under that the letters got smaller and ran downhill.
FLOYD KNOWS THE REST. TAM, IT WAS THE CHRISTMAS WITH THE LOOPS.
Mama came two steps down the red carpet with her hand out. Palm up this time.
“Give me that.”
I folded it once and slid it inside my jacket, behind the postcard.
“Anything he wrote in that place belongs to me,” she said. “I’m his wife.”
“It’s got my name on it,” I said.
Brother Neal came down off the platform in his robe and put his hand near her elbow without touching it.
“Loretta. Let’s give Harlan his service.”
She looked at his hand. Then she sat down on the front pew, right where Daddy used to sit, and set her purse on the spot beside her so nobody could take it.
The veterans sat when she sat.
Bethany and I ended up on the fourth pew with Floyd, because it was the nearest one with room. Brother Neal read Psalm 90. A man from the Legion read out Daddy’s bases in order, Utapao to Little Rock. Somebody’s baby fussed through all of it and nobody took it out.
During the last hymn Bethany leaned into my shoulder and kept her eyes on the book.
“What paper, Tammy?”
Christmas 2017
It was the Saturday before Christmas, and I was up at five because the Air Force had broken me of sleeping any later.
Mama’s kitchen then looked like Mama’s kitchen now. Church bulletins on the fridge under a magnet shaped like Arkansas. The Farm Bureau calendar on the table, because Daddy liked to see the whole month while he ate his eggs.
There was a manila folder under the calendar. I moved it to set my coffee down and the top sheet slid out.
QUITCLAIM DEED. Harlan R. Dunaway to Loretta J. Dunaway. A paragraph of section and township numbers, and then words I knew. Forty acres, more or less, on Mill Creek.
Mill Creek was Daddy’s daddy’s. The pond, the pasture going to cedar, the tin shed where the bass boat lived when it wasn’t in the shop. When I was sixteen he sat Bethany and me down at that same table and read us his will out loud, start to finish, like a flight manifest. The house went to Mama. The creek went to his girls, half and half.
Bethany and Ray had put a trailer inside the creek gate in 2015. Daddy wouldn’t take a dime of rent for it.
On the deed, above his typed name, somebody had written Harlan Dunaway in big slanted cursive with a loop on the H.
Daddy didn’t do loops. Birthday cards, checks, the note on the dashboard about the truck’s oil, it all came out in those square capitals, like he was stenciling crates.
He came in a little after six, coughing, and sat down with his notebook to write the weather. He did it every morning of his life.
I held up the sheet.
“Since when do you do loops?”
He squinted at it. “I don’t do loops.”
Mama was in the doorway in her robe before I heard her coming. She took the folder out of my hand and closed it.
“That’s the insurance,” she said. “His hand shakes on the new pills. I’ve been signing for him since October. Harlan, tell her.”
Daddy went back to his notebook.
“Sign it pretty, then,” he said. “Bethany drove me clear to Fort Smith Wednesday so the VA could fill me full of chalk and take my picture. I ain’t driving anywhere to sign anything.”
Everybody laughed. I laughed too.
I flew out of Little Rock on the twenty-seventh.
After that, every time I put in for leave, Mama called first. He’s worn out. He’s not up to company. Come in the spring when he’s stronger. Then I was in Korea, and then Ramstein, and then two deployments, and every spring there was another reason.
I took every one of them. That part is mine.
Nine years later that folder was one page in my jacket, folded against a catfish.
The fellowship hall
They’d set the food out on folding tables under the basketball hoop. Chicken spaghetti, three pans of green beans, sweet tea out of the silver urn that’s been in that building longer than I’ve been alive.
Floyd got me by the coffee and kept his back to the room.
“I went out to fish the creek in July,” he said. “Young fella in a Creekside Holdings truck came down the hill and told me I was on private property. On Dune’s pond.”
“Did Daddy know?”
“He did after I told him. Hospice, room four, a Thursday. He didn’t say a word for about an hour. Then he asked me to go find him some tape.”
“Why the aisle? Why not just mail it to me?”
Floyd stirred his coffee with the little wooden stick.
“He said if Loretta let you walk in there in peace, she could keep her secret and he’d take it with him. If she stopped you, she’d picked.”
Mama had set up at the head table with the preacher’s wife and a box of tissues. People lined up to hug her. Some of them were the same people who’d stood up for me an hour before.
She waited until the line reached the door. Then she said it loud.
“Harlan was on morphine four weeks. He called Floyd by his dead brother’s name. He wrote down what the dog ate, and that dog’s been in the ground since 2020.”
Plates stopped halfway to mouths.
“He signed Mill Creek over to me himself,” she said. “That creek bought his oxygen when Medicare quibbled. And he did it in front of a notary, because he knew what his soldier girl would do with it the day he was gone.”
Bethany had a paper plate in each hand. She put them both down on the pie table.
“Daddy sold the creek,” she said. “Mama. You told me he sold it.”
“And he did, honey. To me. Then I sold it.”
I opened my mouth, and a woman at the end of the dessert table set down her pie server.
Sherry Pruitt had worked the front desk at First Western since I was in grade school. Her husband Dwayne raised chickens out toward Hatfield. She’d brought the coconut cake.
“I’m the notary on that deed, Tammy,” she said. “I watched Harlan sign it myself.”
Window three
The Polk County courthouse opens at eight. I was on the steps at seven-forty Monday in jeans and a sweatshirt, and I still got looked at.
The woman at window three was Mrs. Cobb, who had my Sunday school class the year I turned nine. She didn’t say she was sorry about Daddy. She said the land records were on the terminal by the wall and copies were a dollar a page.
It took me twenty minutes to find it. I’d never looked up land in my life, and she didn’t come over.
Quitclaim deed. Dated December 20, 2017. Recorded December 28, 2017, the day after I flew out of Little Rock.
At the bottom was Sherry’s stamp and the printed line above it. Personally appeared before me this 20th day of December, 2017. Under that, in Sherry’s round handwriting, First Western Bank, Mena.
The next paper filed against those forty acres came eleven months later. Warranty deed, Loretta J. Dunaway to Creekside Holdings LLC. Consideration: $38,000.
Daddy turned down sixty thousand for that creek in 2006. He told the man to come back when the pond froze solid.
I printed both. Eight dollars.
When I got back to the window, Mrs. Cobb was on her desk phone with her back to me. She hung up when she heard my shoes and rang up the eight dollars without looking at my face.
In the parking lot my phone had two texts.
The first was from the realtor in Maryland. Seller signed! Earnest money due Friday, closing the 30th. A two-bedroom townhouse in Waldorf with a dogwood out front. The first place I’d ever own. I’d been putting money back for it since Korea.
The second was from Bethany.
Mama’s got the prayer chain going. They’re saying you’re at the courthouse trying to take a widow’s house.
I sat in the rental car and typed Creekside Holdings into the Secretary of State’s website with my thumb.
Registered agent: Dwayne Pruitt.
Sherry’s husband.
The creek gate
There’s a new pipe gate at Mill Creek, painted green, with a sign wired to the top bar. CREEKSIDE HOLDINGS LLC. NO TRESPASSING. Past it, where Daddy’s pasture used to run down to the pond, somebody had put up two long chicken houses with the fans going.
Bethany’s trailer still sits on its gravel pad just inside the gate. Ray’s truck was in the yard.
She had the receipts out before I asked. They lived in a purple Crown Royal bag in the kitchen drawer, rubber-banded by year. Money order stubs, three hundred dollars every month, made out to Creekside Holdings LLC. The first one said March 2019.
“Mama said Daddy had to sell it for his medicine,” Bethany said. “She said the new people would let us stay if we paid lot rent. She said don’t you ever bring the creek up to your daddy. She said it would kill him.”
“Did you?”
“Not one time. Seven years.”
Ray was at the table in his feed mill cap, eating cereal at two in the afternoon.
“Tammy, I’m going to say this once,” he said. “You’re flying back to Maryland. We’re the ones living next door to Dwayne Pruitt. You go stirring this and he runs us off, we got nowhere to put a trailer.”
“The will says half this creek is Bethany’s,” I said.
“The will don’t pay the light bill.”
Bethany didn’t say anything. She kept putting the rubber bands back on the stubs, one year at a time, in order.
Then somebody knocked on the trailer door hard enough to rattle the storm glass.
Dwayne Pruitt was on the steps with an envelope, and his truck was still running.
The shop shelf
The envelope said thirty days. Creekside Holdings was ending the month-to-month lot agreement for the trailer at Mill Creek, effective the first.
“Nothing personal, Bethany,” Dwayne said from the bottom step. “I just don’t need the trouble.”
He never once looked at me. He got back in his truck and backed out through the green gate.
Ray put his bowl in the sink and went out the back door.
Mama doesn’t miss Wednesday night prayer meeting. At ten after seven Bethany let us into Daddy’s shop behind the house with the key that’s hung on the same nail since we were in grade school.
It still smelled like two-stroke oil and the Winstons he quit in 1998. The bass boat sat on its trailer under a blue tarp. The shelf over the workbench ran the length of the back wall, and on it were the notebooks. A stack for every year, rubber-banded, the year written in marker on a strip of masking tape. 1974. 1988. 2003.
2017 was two notebooks. I took down the second one and turned to December with my good hand.
SAT DEC 16. 38 DEGREES. GAVE THE DOG THE HAM BONE.
TUE DEC 19. RAIN. 1.2 IN THE GAUGE.
WED DEC 20. LEFT 7:40 AM, BETHANY DROVE. FT SMITH VA. LABS 10 AM. CT SCAN 2:30. 11.4 GAL WALDRON $2.19. HOME 7:15 PM. L IN TOWN ALL DAY.
A yellow sheet was folded into that page. After Visit Summary, Department of Veterans Affairs. Dunaway, Harlan R. December 20, 2017. Checked in 1:48 PM. CT chest with contrast.
First Western opens at nine and closes at five. He was out of that driveway at seven-forty and not back in it till seven-fifteen that night. Fort Smith is eighty miles from Mena, and Waldron is right in the middle.
I held the yellow sheet next to the copy of the deed from my jacket. Personally appeared before me this 20th day of December.
Bethany took the notebook out of my hands and read the page with her lips moving, the way she did in school.
“I drove him,” she said. “He made me stop in Waldron for a chocolate shake.”
Mama’s kitchen table
At nine that night I texted Sherry Pruitt a photo of the Wednesday page and the yellow sheet. One line under it. Mama’s kitchen, tomorrow, 4 PM.
She came at 3:55 in her bank blazer.
Mama was at the table in her same chair, the Farm Bureau calendar in front of her, a newer year. She looked at Sherry, then at me, and didn’t get up.
I put four things on the table in a row. Daddy’s postcard, turned to his capitals. The copy of the deed with the loop on the H. The 2017 notebook open to December 20. The yellow sheet.
“Fort Smith,” I said. “Gone at seven-forty, home at seven-fifteen. The bank’s open nine to five.”
Mama laughed. It was the laugh she uses on the phone with the insurance company.
“He wrote in those things every day of his life,” she said. “He wrote down the dog’s business. He wrote down the rain. You’re going to come in my house and hang me with a rain gauge?”
Nobody answered her.
“I bathed that man. Nine years. I got up four times a night when the oxygen machine beeped. I drove him to Little Rock and Hot Springs and back, and where were you? Korea. Germany. Some tent in the sand.
“And don’t you look at me about that phone call. What was I supposed to tell him? That the one he waited up for every night was laying in a bed in Maryland with a tube down her throat? He’d have quit eating. He’d have been gone in a week.”
“Mama,” Bethany said.
“That creek went on this roof. It went on his oxygen. It went on the Buick so I could get him to his appointments. And you’d have handed your half to Ray to sell for beer money inside a year, Bethany, and every person in that church knows it.”
I didn’t say anything.
Sherry picked up the yellow sheet. She read it twice. Then she set it back down lined up with the edge of the table, like it was a deposit slip at her window.
“Loretta,” she said. “You told me Harlan was too sick to come in.”
“Sherry.”
“You brought it to my window already signed. You said he signed it at the breakfast table that morning and it was a formality. You said, Sherry, I’m his own wife.”
“And you took four hundred dollars off the top when Dwayne bought it, so don’t you sit in my kitchen and—”
Mama stopped.
The refrigerator kicked on.
I said it once.
“Dwayne deeds the creek to Bethany and me, the way the will says. I pay him back his thirty-eight thousand. Sherry mails her notary seal to Little Rock. Nobody takes that notebook to the prosecutor.”
Sherry got her phone out of her purse and called her husband on speaker.
“Forty-five,” Dwayne said. “There’s two chicken houses on it.”
“Thirty-eight,” I said. “Or the notebook is at the prosecutor’s office Monday at eight.”
The line was quiet a while.
“Take it, Dwayne,” Sherry said.
“Fine,” he said, and hung up.
Mama looked at the four things on her table and then at me.
“You walk out that door, Tamara, don’t you ever come back through it.”
Bethany got up first. She put the notebook and the yellow sheet in her purse. I picked up the postcard.
Bethany held the screen door for me and let it slap shut behind us.
The side door
The first Sunday in March I came in through the side door again.
Jeans this time. The blues are in a dry-cleaning bag in the closet of the same two rooms I’ve rented in Waldorf since Walter Reed let me go. The realtor quit texting in January. Somebody else has the dogwood.
A couple of heads turned. Most didn’t.
Mama sits on the piano side now, three rows up, next to the preacher’s wife. When I came past, she opened her hymnal to a page nobody was singing.
The little brass sign that said NOTARY PUBLIC is gone from Sherry’s window at First Western. The green gate sign at the creek is in the boat shed, where Bethany put it with the bolt cutters. The chicken houses are still standing out there with the fans off, and Floyd fishes the pond on Tuesdays.
Bethany and Ray were already on Daddy’s pew. Ray had on a tie I’d never seen.
Floyd sat at the aisle end with his cane across his knees. He moved it.
“Dune’s spot,” he said.
I sat down.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose daddy wrote down every little thing.
For more stories that hit you right in the feels, you won’t want to miss “My Son Checked Walt’s Watch and Said I Was Early. It Ran Four Minutes Slow.” or “A Stranger Brought My Daughter a Check. I Never Finished Adopting Her.”. And if you’re looking for another unexpected connection, check out “The Janitor Left Notes Outside My Classroom. Then a Woman in a Suit Asked for “Dr. Ruiz.””.
