The lawyer who sat across from me in the corner booth of the Bull Street cafe in Savannah, with the contract spread before him, had never worked for my husband. I learned this at ten o clock on a Monday morning, from the lawyer himself, when I asked him to repeat his name for the third time. I am Melanie Harper, thirty six years old, and I had found him in the kitchen of my grandmother in law, Mama Lou, eighty four years old, who had waited tables in that cafe for fifty years. “I never worked for Brandon in my life,” he whispered. “I was hired by a man at the bar.”
He slid a business card across the table. The name on it was Clifford Teague, attorney at law, and under it was an address that, I noticed with a chill, was a post office box. Mama Lou sat beside me in her blue waitress uniform with her coffee cup between her old hands, saying nothing. She had bought the entire Bull Street block, five buildings, for two point two million dollars in cash in 1998, saving a little from every tip for forty years, and no one in the family had ever suspected. The papers on the table would have signed all of it away.
My husband Brandon had brought the lawyer into the family. That was what I had believed since Friday, when Brandon, drunk on bourbon at three in the afternoon, had told me proudly that his lawyer would take care of Mama Lou. I had been furious and afraid. But the man in the corner booth was frightened too. He was a third rate actor who worked at the dinner theater on the island, and he had been paid five hundred dollars to pretend, and he had been told only that the old woman wanted to sell.
A corner booth at a Savannah cafe gave one granddaughter in law the morning to bring her husband back to his family on Bull Street.
I gave my terms to the two of them, quietly, across the table. “Mr. Teague, or whatever your name is, you are going to tell me who hired you. Then you are going to leave this cafe and never come back. I will not call the police, if you tell me the truth. Mama Lou is not going to sign anything today. And my husband is going to come in here at eleven, as he promised, and I am going to be sitting right here in this booth when he does.”
The actor swallowed. “His name is Cliff Dupree,” he said. “He runs the bar on Broughton Street. He said your husband owed him money, and that if the old lady signed, everyone would be paid.” He glanced at Mama Lou. “Madam, I am so sorry.” Mama Lou patted his hand like a grandmother patting a naughty boy. “Honey,” she said, “I have been serving men like you for fifty years. You are not the wicked one. Go on home.” He stood up, shaking, and put his hat on.
But at that moment the front door of the cafe jingled, and in came Brandon, followed by a heavyset man in a cream suit, whom I took to be Cliff Dupree himself. Dupree strode straight to the corner booth and snatched the contract off the table. “This is mine,” he snapped. “Brandon, tell them.” Then he saw the actor, saw me, saw Mama Lou, and understood. He wheeled around with the papers in his fist and ran for the door, shoving over a chair and sending a tray of biscuits flying across the floor. He ran into a wall of aprons. The waitresses of the Bull Street cafe, six women with a combined three hundred years of experience, had heard the commotion and come out of the kitchen with coffee pots. The oldest, Miss Opal, seventy eight, held hers out at arm length, as steady as a pistol. “Mister,” she said, “I would advise you to hand that over before I pour.” Dupree looked at the six steaming pots. He opened his fingers, and the papers floated to the floor, and the whole cafe breathed out.
Brandon stood in the doorway, white faced, with his hands hanging at his sides. Mama Lou looked at him across the room for a long moment. “Brandon Harper,” she said, “I changed your diapers.” He walked over slowly and knelt beside the booth. “Mama Lou,” he said, hoarsely, “I am sorry. I owed that man forty thousand dollars. He said it was only a signature. I did not understand he meant the whole block.” She placed her hand on his head. He wept like a child.
The money consequences were swift. Dupree was arrested for attempted fraud and the bar on Broughton Street was closed by the city. Brandon entered a recovery program on Wilmington Island and has not touched bourbon since. Mama Lou transferred the five buildings of the Bull Street block, worth now over six million dollars, into a charitable trust, to keep the cafe and the apartments for the staff for as long as the street should stand. She kept her uniform, and her tips, and her booth.
In the name of her husband Hubert, who passed in 2003, I started the Hubert Harper Fund. It pays for recovery beds, legal help for older business owners and housing for retired restaurant workers, in Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties. In the first year we placed twenty four people in recovery and helped nineteen elderly owners keep their shops. One was a retired cook from Pooler who had been tricked into signing over his lunch counter. When the papers were voided, he cooked a meal for forty people on the sidewalk.
On a bright Saturday in the spring, Mama Lou sat in the corner booth of the cafe with a cup of coffee and a slice of pecan pie, and I sat across from her. Brandon was behind the counter, in an apron, refilling cups, fourteen months sober. Every customer who passed called her Mama Lou. When the bell over the door jingled, she looked up and smiled, and said to me, with a twinkle, “Melanie, some lawyers are real, and some are only pie.” I laughed until my coffee spilled.
