Did I help Delbert kill my sister, or did I only help him make everybody think he had?
I’ve been asking myself that since Tuesday. I know how it sounds. I’m not trying to make myself the victim here. Delbert lied, but I helped him keep the lie going for forty years. I had reasons. Some of them were even real reasons. None of them make me innocent.
My baby sister Dorrit was twenty-six when she left Kansas. She’d gone off with a man who drove a cattle truck, or so I told our mother. The truth was, Dorrit was leaving Delbert too. I found that out before she went.
I taught fourth grade in Lyons for thirty-three years. I still sub two days a week because a pension doesn’t stretch like it did when I was working full time. I’m seventy-eight now. I’m saying that because people picture a younger woman when they hear about an affair and a secret baby. I wasn’t young. I had two kids, a mortgage, and a husband who always came home smelling like machine oil from the co-op.
Delbert and I had been married ten years. Dorrit was fourteen years younger than I was. I’d helped her with her first job application, her first car payment, and the rent on a little place in town when she got tired of living with Mama. I liked being needed. I also liked being the older sister who had her life in order.
Then I learned my husband had been going to Dorrit’s apartment after his shift.
I found a matchbook in his truck with the name of her motel on it. It had one of those little paper covers, and the ink was rubbed off at the fold. I asked Delbert about it at the kitchen sink.
He kept rinsing his coffee cup. “It’s not what you think.”
I said, “Then tell me what it is.”
He didn’t. He just stood there with that cup in his hand, and I understood enough.
I went to Dorrit’s place the next afternoon. She opened the door with one of my old sweaters on. I remember that stupid sweater more than anything. Brown yarn, one cuff coming loose. I’d given it to her because she said she was cold.
She didn’t deny it. She told me she was pregnant.
I asked whose baby.
She said, “You know whose.”
I slapped her. Just once. Then I went home and made supper for my children like nothing had happened. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell Mama. I didn’t want people looking at me and seeing the woman whose husband had picked her little sister.
That was my first choice. I made more after it.
Dorrit left town the next spring. She said she was going west to stay with a friend. Delbert said he’d help her get there, which should have told me everything I needed to know. I still let him drive her. I told myself I was doing it for the baby. I told myself it was better than a scene in front of the kids.
She called once from a pay phone. I could hear trucks passing behind her.
“Ros, I’m scared,” she said.
I asked if she was alone.
She said yes.
I could have asked where she was. I could have told her to come home. Instead I said, “You made your choice.”
She went quiet. Then she said, “I did. So did you.”
I hung up. I’ve told myself for years that the call dropped. It didn’t.
In March of 1984, Delbert drove to Ely, Nevada. He was gone four days. He came back with a cardboard box of ashes and a death certificate with a county seal on it. He said Dorrit had died in a car wreck on Highway 50.
“She didn’t suffer,” he told me. “I took care of everything.”
I looked at the certificate. The paper was thin, and one line had been typed over. I noticed it. I noticed the ashes were in a plain box, not an urn. I noticed Delbert kept his coat on inside the house.
I didn’t ask where the wreck happened. I didn’t ask why he’d gone alone.
I said, “Did anybody call Mama?”
He told me he’d taken care of that too.
That’s what I remember most. Not the ashes. Not the date. I remember asking if Mama had been told, as though the most important part was who had to make the call.
I helped Delbert tell her. I said I’d seen the certificate. I said there wasn’t anything more to do. When the kids asked where their aunt was, I said she’d died out west. We had a service at the church with no body and no grave. I stood beside Delbert and accepted condolences.
Mama died five years later still believing Dorrit had been buried in Nevada.
I don’t know if the ashes were hers. I never asked to see a name on the box. The certificate might have been real, or it might have been something Delbert’s brother helped him get. His brother was a county clerk then. I didn’t want to know enough to have to do anything about it.
We kept going. That’s what people do when they’re ashamed and there are bills on the counter. The kids grew up. Delbert and I went to the VFW fish fry. I taught school. He fixed tractors. We had Christmas every year.
I set Dorrit’s school picture beside the tree. It was the same picture I’d had since she was a teenager, with her hair brushed back and that little scar above her eyebrow. Delbert never said a word about it. He’d go down to the VFW and come back after I’d put the gifts out.
I thought the picture was a way to remember her. I can admit now it was also a way to make myself feel like I hadn’t forgotten her. That was easier than remembering the call.
Last Tuesday I stopped at Casey’s on Main for gas and coffee. I’d been running late to get home and switch the laundry before Delbert came in from the co-op. Old habits. At the register, a woman with short gray hair rang me up without looking at my face.
“Thirty-eight even, Ros.”
My hand stopped in my purse.
Nobody had called me Ros since 1984. Nobody except Dorrit.
I looked up. She was looking at me now. I knew the chin first. Our daddy had the same one, square at the end. Then I saw the small white scar over her eyebrow, from when the barn door caught her in 1966.
She said, “Oh, no.”
A man behind me shifted his Mountain Dew from one hand to the other.
“Where did you get that name?” I asked.
She looked down at the register. “They told me you’d moved to Florida.”
That was when I knew. Not all of it, but enough. I had spent forty years telling myself I was waiting for proof. There she was, with our father’s chin and that scar. I didn’t need anything else.
“What time do you get off?” I asked.
“Two.”
I paid for my coffee. My fingers shook hard enough that I dropped a nickel. I bent down to get it and heard the man behind me sigh. I was grateful he was impatient. It gave me something ordinary to focus on.
At home, I sat at the kitchen table and held the coffee until it went cold. I didn’t cry. I’m not much of a crier. I kept looking at the clock because two o’clock seemed very far away, though it was less than three hours.
Delbert came in at noon and opened the refrigerator.
“What’s for dinner?” he said.
“I saw Dorrit at Casey’s.”
The refrigerator door stayed open. Cold air rolled across the floor.
After a bit, he said, “You need to lie down, Ros.”
He had never called me Ros in forty-five years. Not once. I looked at him and could see him deciding which lie to use. He was tired, maybe. He was old. He had a bad hip. I felt sorry for him for about half a second, then I hated myself for that too.
I said, “She has the scar from the barn door.”
He closed the refrigerator.
“Lots of people have scars.”
“Not that one.”
He sat down across from me. “This is a mistake.”
“No. The mistake was the certificate.”
He looked at the table. “You’ve got no idea what you’re stirring up.”
That was Delbert. Even then, he could make a thing he’d done sound like something I was doing to him.
I called the principal at the school where I sub. I told her I couldn’t come in Thursday. I told her enough that my voice started to go thin.
She said, “Rosalind, Delbert’s brother is still on the school board.”
“He’s not my boss.”
“No. But you know how this town is.”
I knew. I also knew I was using that as another reason to stay quiet. I had done it with Mama. I had done it with the kids. I had done it every Christmas when I put Dorrit’s picture up and let everybody think it was a tribute.
At two, I was in the Casey’s lot. I parked by the side door and watched people come and go. At 2:05, Dorrit walked out in a dark coat and got into my passenger seat like she’d done it a thousand times when we were girls.
For a few seconds neither of us spoke.
Then she said, “You look old.”
I almost laughed. “So do you.”
She had a yellow envelope in her lap. Her fingers kept working at the flap, back and forth, like she was trying to smooth it.
I said, “You’re alive.”
“Most days.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“You helped him tell people I was.”
There it was. No yelling. No big speech. Just the truth said plain.
I said, “I thought he’d killed you.”
Dorrit looked at me. “Did you?”
I couldn’t answer that. I had thought it. I had also thought that if she was dead, at least the shame was over. There was a time when I even felt relieved. I have never said that aloud before.
She opened the envelope. There was a photograph, soft around the corners, and a money order stub. She handed me the photograph.
A baby boy was wrapped in a hospital blanket. A man was holding him in what looked like a cafeteria. The man was turned partly away from the camera, but I knew the shape of his nose and the bend in his shoulder. I’d slept beside that man for forty-five years.
I turned the picture over. There was no writing.
“Where was this taken?” I asked.
“Wichita. He drove down when Cal was born.”
I read the money order stub. It was for eighty dollars, dated the month after the picture. The name on it was Delbert’s. So was the return address.
Dorrit said, “He sent money for a while.”
I looked at her. “A while?”
“Until Cal was four. Then he said it had to stop.”
I rubbed my thumb over the stub. “He told me you died in a car wreck.”
“He told me you knew.”
I put the picture down. It kept sliding on the vinyl seat, so I held it by the edges.
Dorrit told me the part Delbert had skipped. She had gone to Nevada because she thought a friend there would help her find work. Delbert drove her. He told me he was going to bury her, but he’d already helped her get settled. The ashes were from a cremation place, she said. They were not hers. She didn’t know whose they were.
She had wanted him to tell me the truth. He said he couldn’t, not with the kids at home and his job and my family in town. Then he told her I had agreed to the story.
“I never agreed to anything,” I said.
“You told Mama I was dead.”
I held the money order stub in my lap. I could’ve explained that I was angry, that I was scared, that Delbert told me there was no other way. Every reason sounded like a door I was trying to slip through.
Dorrit said, “He said you’d understand once things settled down.”
“They never settled down.”
“No,” she said. “They didn’t.”
I asked about her son. She told me he was forty now, had a wife and two kids, and lived in Colorado. She’d raised him by herself. She had never told him his father was Delbert. She said she’d planned to tell him when he turned eighteen, then twenty-one, then after he had his own family. Every year she found a reason to wait.
I understood that part too well. Waiting can look a lot like doing nothing, if you keep your hands busy.
“Why come back now?” I asked.
“Cal found the money order stubs when I moved. He asked who Delbert was.” She looked at the envelope. “I told him.”
I asked if she wanted money. I wish I could say I didn’t. It was the first thing I asked. I’d spent years hearing stories about people who returned when they needed something. That thought came out before the sister part of me could stop it.
She said, “I want him to know I didn’t make up his father.”
That was all.
I drove her home after her shift. She lived in a little rental outside town. I sat in the car while she went in, because I didn’t know if I was welcome inside. She came back out with one more piece of paper: a copy of the certificate Delbert had given our mother.
The seal looked wrong. I had never noticed that before, or I had and refused to name it. Dorrit said she’d kept a copy because she knew someday she might need proof that Delbert had said she was dead.
I took the papers home.
Delbert was sitting at the kitchen table. He had made himself a sandwich and left the knife on the plate.
I set the photograph in front of him.
He touched the edge, then pulled his hand back.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“From Dorrit.”
He stared at it.
I put the money order stub beside the picture. “You paid her.”
“Not for long.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He rubbed the spot between his eyes. “I was trying to help.”
“Were you Cal’s father?”
He looked at the photo again. “Yes.”
I sat down. I wanted him to say he was sorry. I also wanted him to say it had been a mistake, like that would make it small enough to carry. He did neither.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
“I did not know about the baby.”
“You knew about us.”
“I knew you went to her apartment. I didn’t know you went back after you drove her away.”
He shook his head. “I thought keeping it from you was better.”
“For who?”
He didn’t answer.
I asked if he knew Dorrit was alive when he came back with the ashes.
“Yes.”
The word sat there between us. I did not throw anything. I did not slap him. I was too tired for a scene, and there were crumbs from his sandwich beside my hand.
“You told me she was dead.”
“I thought it was the only way to end it.”
“You ended nothing.”
He looked at me then. “You went along with it.”
He was right. That was the part I couldn’t argue away.
“I did,” I said.
For the first time, Delbert seemed to understand I wasn’t going to fight him over which of us was worse. Maybe he expected that. We had done it before with other things: who forgot the bill, who made the kids mad, who embarrassed whom at church. I had spent half my life finding a way to share blame until nobody had to hold all of it.
That night, I called our daughter in Lawrence and our son in Fort Collins. I told them Dorrit was alive. I told them their father had lied about the death. Then I told them I knew more than I’d admitted, and I’d helped him keep the lie going.
Our daughter asked, “How long did you know?”
I said, “I knew enough in 1984.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “I need time.”
Our son said, “Dad told us you wanted the funeral closed.”
I had forgotten that. Or I had put it somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it. I remember telling him it was true. I’d repeated Delbert’s words to my own children.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He said, “I don’t know what to do with that.”
I didn’t ask him to.
The next morning, Delbert went to his brother’s house. I don’t know what they said. That afternoon, he came back and told me he’d signed a statement saying Dorrit was alive when he returned from Nevada. He also wrote down that Cal was his son. His brother had helped get the certificate, though Delbert said he didn’t know whether the ashes had ever been linked to a real person.
I asked why he was telling the truth now.
He said, “Because you’re going to.”
He was right about that too.
I called Dorrit and asked if Cal could have the papers. She said she’d speak to him first. I didn’t press. I’d spent enough years deciding what other people could bear.
Delbert moved into his brother’s spare room that weekend. I didn’t throw him out. He packed a suitcase and left it by the front door. He asked if I wanted him to take the old picture of Dorrit from beside the tree.
I said, “No.”
That Christmas I put the picture up again. Not because I’d earned the right to remember her. I don’t think I have. I put it there because I was done pretending it was only a memorial.
The old school picture leaned against the tree, and the photograph of Delbert holding Cal sat beside it. I left the money order stub on the table where the kids could see it.
