“Because I need to settle some things here,” I said, my voice leaving no room for argument. “Grown-up things. You go stay there and have fun with your cousins.”
I risked a glance at Otis. He was pale, white as a sheet, the color drained completely from his face. He stopped chewing. He knew exactly what was happening. He knew I was evacuating them.
I didn’t wait for his permission. I went to the bedroom and packed a bundle with the girls’ clothes—just a few changes, their toothbrushes, a comb. I stuffed it all into a flour sack.
I took the three of them by the hand. “Let’s go.”
“But Mama, how are we going?” Pearl asked, tugging on my hand. “It’s far.”
“We’re going in the wagon first,” I explained. “I’m going to ask Mr. Banks to take us to the Greyhound Station.”
I marched them out of the house and down the road to Mr. Banks’ place. He was our closest neighbor, a good man with a reliable truck. When I asked him to take the girls to the bus stop in Cordell, he looked at me kind of suspicious, tilting his hat back.
“Is everything alright, Miss Hattie?”
“It’s urgent, Mr. Banks,” I insisted, my eyes pleading with him. “I will pay you for the gas and your time. Please.”
He saw the desperation in my face and nodded. “Alright then.”
I settled the girls into the truck bed. Ruth, Ruby, Pearl—the three of them sitting there, looking small and fragile, looking back at me.
“Behave yourselves at your Auntie’s house, do you hear me?” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Obey her. Be polite. Wash your dishes.”
“Yes, Mama.”
I hugged each one of them. I squeezed them tight, smelling the scent of their hair—sunshine and lye soap—saving that moment in my heart because, God help me, I didn’t know when I was going to see them again.
The truck engine roared to life. It pulled away, kicking up dust. I stood there in the road, watching them go, waving goodbye until my arm hurt. I waved until they were nothing but a speck disappearing down the dirt road.
Only when they were gone did I let the mask drop.
I turned around and walked back to the house. I entered and closed the door behind me with a decisive click.
Otis was sitting in the living room, exactly where I had left him. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders slumped like a man waiting for the executioner.
I looked at him, and he looked up at me. And in that moment, without a single word spoken, the truth hung in the air between us like smoke.
He knew. He knew I had heard every whispered word. He knew I knew everything. And he knew, with terrifying certainty, that nothing was ever going to be like before.
We stayed there frozen—me standing like an avenging angel, him sitting like a condemned man. The silence was heavy, thick enough to choke on.
Then, I saw him start to tremble. First his hands, shaking on his knees. Then his shoulders. And then he started to cry—really cry, loud, ugly sobs, without even trying to hide it.
“Hattie…” he choked out.
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. My voice came out hard, cold as steel. I had never spoken like that to him—to anyone—in my entire life.
He lowered his head, sobbing into his chest.
“Did you hear?” he whispered. “You heard what I said this morning?”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of defeat.
“I heard every word,” I said, walking closer. “Every single word you whispered while you thought I was asleep. For seven months, you came to my side every morning asking forgiveness, but you never had the courage to tell me while I was awake.”
“I couldn’t…” he wept.
“You couldn’t?” I laughed, a bitter, sharp sound. “What, Otis? You couldn’t tell me that you signed a contract on our daughter? That you promised Ruby—a nine-year-old child—to a fifty-two-year-old man?”
He let out a sob that sounded like an animal in pain. “I was desperate, Hattie! The debt…”
“I know about the debt,” I cut him off. “You gambled our money. The money I saved sewing, washing clothes until my back broke, going hungry so the girls could eat. You took it all and gambled it on cards.”
The rage flared up in me, hot and blinding. I turned on my heel and marched into the kitchen. I grabbed the knife I used to cut meat—a heavy, sharp blade with a wooden handle.
I walked back into the living room.
When he saw the knife in my hand, the color drained from his face again. He went white. He raised his hands in surrender.
“Hattie, for the love of God, don’t!”
“I ain’t gonna kill you, Otis,” I said, my voice surprisingly calm, “even though you deserve it. But I want you to sit right there and tell me everything from the beginning. And if you lie one word to me—just one—I swear to the Lord I will finish you right here.”
I pulled up a chair opposite him and sat down. I placed the knife on the table between us, the metal gleaming in the morning light, but I kept my hand resting on the handle.
“Talk.”
He breathed deep, wiping the tears and snot from his face with the back of his hand. He looked like a broken man.
“It was January the 15th,” he began, his voice shaking. “A Tuesday night. Big Joe was running a game in the back of his place. Poker.”
“I went,” he confessed. “I had gone other times… Did you know?”
“Yes, I knew,” I said coldly. “I knew you played once in a while, but I thought it was little stuff. A few cents here and there.”
“That night… there were folks from out of town,” he continued. “Rich men. Landowners. The game was high, Hattie. The stakes were big.”
He stopped, taking a ragged breath.
“I thought I was going to win,” he pleaded, looking at me for understanding I didn’t have to give. “I thought I was going to double our money, triple it. I was going to buy more land, more livestock. I was going to improve our life.”
“You took all our money?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“I took the three hundred dollars we had saved,” he whispered. “All of it.”
Three hundred dollars. Two years of savings. Two years I spent sewing late at night by kerosene light after the girls were asleep, after he was asleep, sewing until my fingers bled. And he took it all in one night and lost it.
“I lost,” he said simply. “I lost everything in the first few rounds. And then… then I got desperate.”
“I asked to borrow,” he admitted, staring at his hands like they didn’t belong to him. “Mr. Thorne was there, watching the game like a hawk. He lent me a thousand dollars.”
“You borrowed a thousand dollars?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. The sum was staggering. It was more money than I had ever seen in one place.
“Yes,” he cried. “I thought I was going to win back what I had lost! I was going to fix it, Hattie! I was going to win it back!”
“But you didn’t win,” I said, stating the cold, hard fact.
“I didn’t win,” he sobbed. “I lost the thousand too. So I asked for more. Another thousand. He lent it, and I lost it. I asked for another thousand. I lost it all.”
He looked up at me, his eyes red and swollen. “At the end of the night, I owed Silas Thorne three thousand dollars.”
