The bank in Destin was a low, pink stucco building with a red tile roof and a pelican perched on the sign. I went on a Tuesday, alone, with the brass key in my pocket and the letter of Daddy folded in my purse. A young teller with a gold name tag looked up my number in a ledger, and her eyebrows rose. “Miss Annie Vickers? Please wait here.” She vanished through a swinging door. I stood in the cool air of the lobby, watching the ceiling fans, my heart pounding like a fist against a door. A minute later, a silver haired man in a seersucker suit came out and took my hand in both of his.
“Miss Vickers, I am Walter Pruitt, the manager. Your father came to see me every year for thirty seven years. He told me you would come.” He looked at me with a kindness that made my throat close. “He said you would come when you were ready, and that I should not rush you.” He led me to a room in the back, small, windowless, with a table and two chairs. A green metal box, the size of a bread loaf, sat in the middle. Box 9. He placed the key in my palm. “I will leave you alone,” he said, softly. “Take all the time you need.”
Then I turned the key. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a heavy bundle. I unfolded the cloth, and my breath stopped. Coins. Dozens of them, thick and dark and irregular, stamped with a cross and a crude shield. Pieces of eight. Silver, black with age. Beneath them, a smaller bundle of gold, six heavy discs the size of a half dollar, each shining as brightly as the day they were cast. I touched one with a finger. It was cold. It was real. And underneath it all, in a plastic bag, was a folded letter, in the square handwriting of Daddy.
A key in a tackle box opened a bank box in Destin and gave a daughter the secret her father kept for thirty years.
It was dated 1986. The letter explained everything. One October morning, he had snagged his net on something enormous, off the coast near Destin, in forty feet of water. He had dived down, alone, in the early light, and found the hull of a very old ship, buried in the sand. A Spanish ship, lost three centuries earlier. He had brought up a single wooden box, and in the box, the coins. He wrote, I did not tell your mother. She would have worried. I did not tell the state. They would have taken it and given me a plaque. I went back every Wednesday for thirty years and brought up one handful at a time.
I read the words through blurred eyes. He wrote that he had sold the silver slowly, one coin at a time, to a collector in New Orleans, and put the money in the bank. He had paid off the boat. He had paid my college, which I had thought was a scholarship. He had paid for the cancer treatment of Mama, after the insurance ran out, and told her it was a church fund. He had saved the rest. The gold, six pieces, he had never sold. They were for me. He wrote, I kept these for you, because you are the one who went fishing. The others stayed home and sulked. Do you know why I never trusted your brother, Annie? I will tell you.
When Wayne was sixteen, Daddy had found him in the bait shed at midnight with a flashlight, going through the tackle boxes. He had found two of the coins. He had taken them to a pawn shop in Mobile and sold them for forty dollars. Daddy had followed the trail, bought them back, and said nothing. He wrote, I did not want him to know that I knew. I thought if I forgave him quietly, he would turn into a good man. Maybe he did. I do not know. But I could not take the risk. So I hid it where only a daughter who loved me would think to look.
I closed the letter. I put my face in my hands and cried, quietly at first, then without any restraint at all, until the manager knocked softly on the door and asked if I needed a glass of water. I said no, thank you. I said I had just been given the most beautiful gift in the world and I was not sure how to hold it. He nodded. He said, “Miss Vickers, your father opened this account with a single dollar and a handshake. In thirty seven years, I never once saw him spend a nickel on himself.”
The silver and the cash, when counted, came to a little over one million, one hundred thousand dollars. I did not tell my brother or sister. Not at first. For a month I carried the secret around like a warm stone in my pocket. I did not want it to change me, or them. Then, at Christmas, Debbie called and asked, weakly, if she could come and sit on my porch. She told me she was sorry about the tackle box. She said she had been cruel. I said, “Debbie, come on over. I will put on the coffee.” We sat for two hours, and for the first time in years, we talked like sisters.
In the spring, I did something I had always wanted to do. I bought the old fishing pier on the north end of the bay, the one Daddy used to take me to, which had been closed for ten years. I fixed the planks and the rails and painted it white. I hung a sign over the entrance that said, Wednesday Pier. Free to all children and their grandparents, every Wednesday, rod and bait included. By May, a hundred kids showed up every week. They fished off the stern with their grandfathers, and I walked among them, baiting hooks, telling the stories I remembered, in the voice of my father.
Wayne came in July. He walked down the pier alone, in a pressed shirt, looking green before he even reached the end. I handed him a pole. He said, “Annie, I know what I did. I know that Daddy knew. I found out last month. Debbie told me.” He cast clumsily. The line splashed far too near. “I would like to start over, if you will let me.” I took the pole from his hand and showed him how to hold it, the way Daddy had shown me, with the thumb along the line. A small gold light was spreading across the Gulf. “It is Wednesday,” I said. “That is a good place to start.”
