“Don’t stand there looking like I stole him,” she said. “He chose me.”
I didn’t answer. At the time, I thought the truth was simple and cruel: Dewitt had chosen my sister. I’d have to live with that.
I’d started dating Alvis, a good man who drove a bread truck in Sacramento. I brought him home on the bus for the wedding, partly because I cared about him and partly because I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me. We married the next year. I didn’t move back to Yerington until 1972.
Alvis and I had forty-two years together before his heart gave out. I’m grateful for every one of them. I also need to say something that makes me sound disloyal: I never stopped wondering why Dewitt hadn’t answered those letters.
I never asked. Dewitt and I sat at the same Thanksgiving table for fifty-four years. We passed the rolls. We talked about the weather and the price of hay. He was Madge’s husband, and I was Alvis’s wife. There were things I thought a decent person ought to leave alone.
I’ve always been proud, too. Everybody who knows me knows it. They call me Lulu, after a cartoon my daddy liked, and they say I’d rather walk ten miles in the snow than ask for a ride. That sounds funny until you realize how long pride can keep a person quiet.
Madge died in April, at seventy-seven. At the funeral lunch, Dewitt sat across from me with a paper plate he didn’t touch. He was seventy-six, still lean, still in his good boots.
“Lulu,” he said, low enough that the people beside us wouldn’t hear, “can I ask you something I should’ve asked in 1969?”
