The silver Mercedes rolled up to the edge of the pavilion in Ocean City while two hundred Pinders were still holding their paper plates, and a tall man in a gray suit stepped out into the sea wind. He was Gerald Whitcomb, chief executive of Bay Spice Company, the man who had put my crab boil seasoning into the kitchens of the whole country. He looked at the bib around my neck, and then at my son, and his jaw went hard. Without a word he walked to the back door of the car and opened it. A man in a leather jacket sat inside, looking at his shoes.
“This is Tommy Dunleavy of Salisbury,” said Mr. Whitcomb, in a voice that carried across the pavilion. “Mr. Dunleavy telephoned my office on Tuesday. He told me he held a note for ninety one thousand dollars against the son of Mrs. Pinder, and he suggested that my company might wish to settle it, in exchange for a quiet signature on the sale. I recorded the call. I also called the Maryland State Police. They are parked behind the snack bar, and they have heard every word.” A man by the cotton candy machine put down his cup and showed a badge.
Wesley, who was fifty three years old and still wearing the bib he had made me tie on that morning, went white as a fish belly. Kristen put her hand over her mouth. For three years my son had been losing money to football games and horse races in a back room in Salisbury, and for three months he had been telling me I was confused, and that a sale to a company I did not know was my last chance. I had put on a bib to keep the peace. Now it hung on me like a flag of surrender.
A tin of seasoning opened on a picnic table gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the water in Crisfield.
I gave my terms with my own hands, reaching up to untie the bib and fold it on the table in front of me. “Wesley, you will go with the troopers and tell them everything about Mr. Dunleavy. Then you will go to the counselor in Salisbury that Mr. Whitcomb has already found for you, and you will go every week for as long as it takes. I will not pay that note, and I will not sign anything today. The seasoning stays in my family, and the tin stays on my shelf. Kristen, you are welcome in my kitchen, but there will be no more secrets in it.”
Wesley sank onto the bench of the picnic table beside me. “Mama,” he said, “I told myself I was borrowing against your name, only until I won back what I lost. Every time I lost, I borrowed more. I made you wear a bib because I wanted you to look helpless, so that everyone would believe me. I did not know how to look at you.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Daddy taught me to tell the truth to a fish and a customer, and I told neither of them anything for three years. I am so sorry.”
Tommy Dunleavy had other ideas. When the troopers came around the corner of the snack bar, he slid out of the Mercedes and made a dash for the boardwalk, with the signed note of Wesley crumpled in his fist. He had not counted on Delphine, my cousin, who stood six feet tall and had run the crab boil crew at every reunion for forty years. She swung a steel stockpot full of steaming water out of the fire pit, held it level, and stepped in front of him. “Go on,” she said. Tommy stopped short. The troopers took him by both arms.
The sea wind blew over the pavilion, and for a moment nobody moved. Then somebody started clapping, and then a hundred and ninety nine other Pinders joined in. Mr. Whitcomb shook hands with the troopers and walked back to my table with his tie blown over his shoulder. He said he had been at my kitchen table in Crisfield twice in his life, and both times I had fed him, and he had never forgotten it. He sat down, took a plate, and ate a whole crab, shell and all, to the cheering of the family.
The money consequences were tidy. Dunleavy was charged with illegal gambling, extortion and loan sharking, and the note of ninety one thousand dollars was thrown out as unenforceable. Wesley gave a full statement and was not charged. The six million, six hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the seasoning stayed in the bank under my name, with Bay Spice Company licensing my recipe for a fair royalty under an agreement I signed that autumn with my own lawyer beside me. Nobody has ever made me wear a bib since.
In the name of Earl, who passed in 2020, I started the Earl Pinder Fund. It pays for boats, engines, crab pots and safety gear for young watermen in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties. In the first year we outfitted fourteen young crews. One was a boy of nineteen from Deal Island whose father had lost his boat to gambling debts. When he guided his new skiff out into the Tangier Sound before dawn, he stood at the tiller, laughing, with gulls wheeling over his head.
Wesley came to see me in Crisfield on a gray Sunday in October, six months after the reunion. He had given up the back room and the telephone calls, and he had gone back to work on the water for his cousin. He carried a bushel of crabs up my back steps, and set it down on the porch. I put the big pot on the stove, and he stirred the seasoning in with the old wooden paddle of Earl. We ate on newspaper at the kitchen table, with the windows steamed over, and nobody tied a bib on anyone.
