“Because I sold it, Aunt Loretta,” I answered, and I laid my hand flat on the white envelope with the little blue emblem in the corner. “The company that makes the praline cake. The fig preserves. The pecan brittle in the red tins, the ones you buy at the Kroger on Johnston Street.” My aunt stared at me over her glasses. “Gloria,” she said slowly, “that is the Mama Odile brand.” I nodded. “Mama Odile was our grandmother, and I named it for her. I started it in my kitchen twenty two years ago. It is mine. It was mine, I mean, until August.”
The silence in that kitchen was the deepest I have ever heard. Uncle Pete had risen halfway out of his chair. Marcy had one hand clapped over her mouth. And Renee, at the end of the table, was perfectly still, with her purse in her lap and her knuckles white around the clasp. I took out the first page of the closing papers and set it on the oilcloth. The number at the bottom had so many zeros that Aunt Loretta had to hold it to the window light. “Twelve million dollars,” I said. “After taxes, a little under eight.”
“Gloria,” my aunt whispered, “all those years you were baking.” I smiled. “I was, Auntie. I was baking six days a week, at four in the morning, with six women from St. Anne. I was packing boxes and loading trucks and arguing with grocery managers.” I looked at Renee. “And every Thanksgiving, my cousin said Gloria does a little baking. I never corrected her. I wanted to see how long she would keep saying it.” Renee made a sound like a sob, and then, because she is an honest woman at the bottom, she did not look away.
A pound cake carried to the wrong carport can sweeten a family truth that would not wait.
“I told them you were sick,” she said, in a voice scraped raw. “At first it was a small lie. Marcy had mentioned that you looked thin, and I said you were recovering from a procedure, and people started sending money. I only meant to hold a little, to help you. Then Dale lost his job. Then my mortgage came due. And I kept thinking, Gloria does not need it, she bakes, she has her little house.” Her face crumpled. “I am so ashamed. I spent your surgery on a roof, and a car, and a trip to Destin. And I never once thought you might be rich.”
Aunt Loretta did not shout. She is eighty four, and she has buried two husbands and a son, and she has learned the economy of a single sentence. “Renee,” she said, “you took the pennies of an old woman for an operation that never happened.” Renee began to cry out loud. Uncle Pete cleared his throat and added gruffly that he had given a thousand dollars. And Marcy, soft hearted Marcy, who had sent her last two hundred on a phone she could barely afford, put her arm around the shoulders of Renee and wept with her.
I let them cry for a while. Then I stood up. I had made my decision, I told them, three nights before, at my kitchen table, with my spiral notebook open to the page of six names. Every dollar given for my surgery would be returned today, with interest, from me. Not from Renee. The money was mine to give, and I had no wish to see my cousin ruined. In return, I asked only that Renee tell every donor, in person, the truth. Face to face, on their porches. Starting with Mrs. Thibodeaux next door and ending with the ladies at St. Anne.
Aunt Loretta blinked. “Gloria, those are not your debts.” I gave her a soft look. “Auntie, they are my name. Someone used my name. I would rather spend the money to put it right than keep it to be right.” I wrote six checks that afternoon on the oilcloth, in my careful baker handwriting, and each one covered the donation and a good deal more. Aunt Loretta got her eight hundred, and two thousand besides. Marcy got a check she tried to push back. I tucked it into her purse while she was hugging me.
Renee did the porch visits. It took her three weeks. She wore a plain dress and drove her own car. At the last stop, the circle of St. Anne ladies on a Wednesday morning, she stood before eleven women in folding chairs and said it in nine words I will not forget. I lied about my cousin, I stole from you, and I am sorry. Not one of them spoke. Then Mrs. Thibodeaux, who is ninety, got up with her cane and patted Renee on the arm and said, loudly, that the Lord forgave worse and the church would too.
The reunion was held in Gulf Shores the following June, in a beach house with eleven bedrooms that I rented for the entire family and paid for in cash. Aunt Loretta sat on the porch in a rocker, with a straw hat and a pitcher of sweet tea, watching the waves. Uncle Pete taught the grandchildren to fish off the pier. Marcy brought potato salad. And Renee, with a long skirt and a quiet look, arrived early and made the beds, all eleven of them, without a word, and nobody asked her to.
I kept the navy cardigan. I kept the sedan with the cracked dashboard. And I kept one thing from the sale, a ten pound tub of the praline mix of my grandmother, which I still stir by hand on Sunday mornings in the kitchen where I began. Last Sunday Renee came by, uninvited, with a bag of pecans. She stood in the doorway and asked, shyly, whether I would teach her to bake a little. I looked at her for a long time. Then I handed her an apron, and the wooden spoon, and said, Gloria bakes a lot, cher. Start by stirring.
