“Rita,” I said, “sit down.” She had risen halfway out of the picnic bench, one hand clutching the brim of her sun hat, the other gripping the front of her blouse as if the eels might leap. The plastic bag lay in the middle of the red checkered tablecloth, between the corn and the crab mallets, six long dark bodies twisting inside it like thick ropes. Fifty relatives had gone silent. Somewhere in the distance a child laughed on the swings. “I brought a few friends from the stall,” I said, quite pleasantly. “They are fresh. I thought you might want to see what a woman who works at a fish market actually sells.”
I let that sit. Then I opened the first envelope and laid the insurance form on the table. “In 2019, my husband was in Johns Hopkins with pneumonia. He could not hold a fork. A form was signed that year changing the beneficiary of his union life insurance from me to his sister. Eighty five thousand dollars. The signature on this form is small and neat. Stan signed with a big loopy S. You all know it. You have seen it on a hundred birthday cards.” A man at the far end of the table, one of the cousins from Dundalk, pulled out his phone and scrolled to a photograph. He held it up. A card, with a loopy S. He nodded slowly.
Walt, the husband of Rita, was a short, round man in a Ravens jersey. He had picked up the distributor letter and he was reading it for the second time. “Fourteen point nine million,” he said, very quietly, to no one. He turned to his wife. “Rita, you told me Dee was broke. You told me she was working at that stall because she had no choice. I sent her a Christmas card with twenty dollars in it.” He looked sick. “And the life insurance. Eighty five thousand. You said it was from an old savings bond.” Rita pressed her hand to her chest. “Walter, do not make a scene. It is a family matter.”
A bag of live eels on a picnic table and one forged life insurance form ended a family myth that a widow had nothing.
“It is a notarized matter,” I said. “Bernie, would you read the name of the notary?” My accountant, a small man in suspenders who had come with a briefcase and a paper plate, stood up from the end of the bench. “Tammy Kowalczyk Brandt,” he read. “Notary public, State of Maryland, commission number four three one oh two.” Every head turned. At the far end of the table, a woman in a blue sundress, thirty years old, with the chin of her mother, had gone the color of a boiled shrimp. “I did not know,” she said, in a thin voice. “Mom told me Uncle Stan had agreed. I only stamped it. I swear I only stamped it.”
Rita broke then. She did not scream or shout. She simply lowered herself back down to the bench, one hand to her face, and began to cry, the loud, ugly crying of an old woman who has been caught. “I needed it,” she said. “Walt lost the business in 2018. We were drowning. Stan was dying, Dee, and you had everything, the stalls, the house. I thought, he would want me to have it. I thought nobody would ever look.” She raised her eyes to me, wet and furious and terribly frightened. “You always had everything. You smelled like fish and you had everything.”
I stood there, a short woman in a fisherman sweater, with fifty people watching. And I will tell you what I felt. I felt no triumph at all. I felt the strange, hollow ache of knowing that someone had envied me for thirty years, and that I had never once noticed. I sat down across from her. “Rita,” I said, “you could have asked. If you had come to my kitchen table in 2020 and said, Dee, we are drowning, I would have written you a check that afternoon. You know that. You have always known that.” She was silent. “That is the part I cannot forgive.”
Here is what I did. I did not call the police, though Bernie said I could. I told Rita that she would repay the eighty five thousand dollars, with interest, in monthly installments, to the trust I was setting up for the grandchildren of Stan. Walt, who had gone as pale as the tablecloth, wrote out the first check right there, on the back of a paper plate, with a shaking hand. Tammy, I told, would surrender her notary commission, and would write a letter to the state. She nodded, mute. I think she was relieved. A secret like that makes a very heavy purse.
Then I picked up the bag of eels. They had grown quiet. I carried them across the grass to the edge of the pond at Patterson Park, a small green pond with ducks and a gazebo, and I looked around to see if anybody was watching. Nobody was, except the children, who had gathered at a respectful distance. I opened the bag. Six dark shapes slid into the water, one by one, and vanished. “Go on,” I said. “Enjoy the pond.” A little boy asked me if that was illegal. I said I thought it probably was. He grinned.
The reunion went on. The crab feast was served at five, steaming hot, mounded on newspaper, with Old Bay thick as snow, and for the first time in years, I sat at the head of the table. People brought me plates. A cousin I had not seen in a decade took my hand and said that she had never believed Rita for a minute. Another told me, in a whisper, that she had always known I was the smart one. I thanked them. I ate three crabs. I drank two Natty Bohs. I laughed so hard at a story about Stan and a goat that I had to put down my mallet.
The next August, I hosted the reunion myself. I rented the big pavilion at Patterson Park and paid for the crab feast for all hundred and ten of us, and I put up a hand lettered sign by the entrance. Nobody here is poor. Everyone is welcome. Rita came, with Walt, and sat at a far table, in a plain dress, and sent her check in the mail to the trust on the first of every month. At the end of the evening she walked up to me and said a single word. “Sorry.” I nodded. I handed her a crab. It was enough.
