The man in the suit was Tom Cavanaugh, and I had last seen that face forty years earlier, across a workbench in my first metal building off Highway 65, a nineteen year old with grease on his chin who had come in begging for a job. I had given him one. I had lent him the money for his first truck. Now he was a real estate man with a gold watch and a briefcase, and he stood in the doorway of the beauty shop looking from Tonya to a pink scarf under the dryer. I am Delbert Haines, eighty five years old, and I held very still.
Tom Cavanaugh walked across the shop in his polished shoes and stopped beside the chair of Tonya. “Mrs. Haines,” he said pleasantly, “I wanted to meet you before Friday. But before we go any further, I have one question about the listing. It says that Mr. Haines is incapacitated and that you hold his power to sell.” The eyes of Tonya slid sideways. “That is correct,” she said, a little too quickly. “Rick and I have taken care of him for two years.” Tom nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “May I ask where Mr. Haines is today?”
Lacey, my granddaughter, was holding a curling iron in her hand, and I saw her fingers whiten around it. Tonya laughed, a bright, brittle sound. “He is at the lake, napping, most likely,” she said. “He does not know what day it is.” The tall man turned his head, very slowly, until he was looking straight at the pink dryer by the window. A corner of the scarf had slipped. I raised my hand from under the hood and lifted the whole scarf off my head, and I said, “Tom Cavanaugh, you still owe me for a truck.”
A pink scarf worn under a salon dryer gave one boat builder the length of a Friday afternoon to bring his daughter in law back to the truth in Branson.
I gave my terms in the middle of that beauty shop with my scarf in one hand and my cane in the other. “Tonya, I am not in memory care, and I have not signed away anything that I understood. Mr. Cavanaugh, I thank you for your honesty. Here is what will happen. The power of attorney that my son tricked me into is canceled tonight. The listing is canceled. You and Rick will leave the lake house by the first of the year, and I will pay for the counseling that both of you need. And you will not step into my dock yard without a call.”
Tonya sat frozen in the chair with her cape around her neck, and the foil on her hair glinted in the light. Her mouth worked, and then it all poured out. “Delbert, I have one hundred and forty thousand dollars on cards,” she said. “I buy things at three in the morning, from the television, and they come in boxes, and I hide them in the garage. Rick lost his job and I lost my mind. We thought if we sold the lake house, we could start over in Florida and nobody would ever know what I am.” She pressed her face into her hands. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
But a woman caught in the open is quick to bolt. Tonya ripped off her cape, snatched the listing agreement and the signed power of attorney from the briefcase of Tom Cavanaugh on the counter, and ran for the glass door of the shop, with foil flashing on her head. She got as far as the sidewalk mat. The owner, a stout woman named Peggy with a can of hairspray in each hand, stepped across the doorway. Lacey moved in from behind. And a row of customers in capes and curlers rose together like a flock of startled geese.
Tonya stopped at the door of the beauty shop with the papers clutched against her chest, with the glittering neon of the Branson Strip flickering on in the dusk outside and a tour bus idling at the curb. Nobody spoke. The women in capes stood in a silent circle with their hands on their hips. Peggy lowered the hairspray. Tom Cavanaugh said, kindly, “Mrs. Haines, you do not want to go out there with a tour bus watching.” Tonya looked at the bus, and at me, and at the pink scarf in my hand. She walked back and dropped the papers on the counter.
The consequences were practical and kind. My lawyer in Springfield canceled the power of attorney the next morning, and the listing agreement was torn in half in front of Tom Cavanaugh, who insisted on doing it himself. Rick and Tonya moved out of the lake house on the thirtieth of December, to a small rental in Hollister, and both began the counseling that I had promised to pay for. Tonya sold the boxes in the garage on the internet. I had the locks changed, and I hired a nurse for two hours a day, mostly for the company.
In the name of my wife Opal, who passed in 2018, I started the Opal Haines Fund. It pays for respite care for families looking after loved ones with memory loss and for boating safety classes for children, in Taney, Stone and Christian counties. In the first year we gave six thousand hours of respite care and taught three hundred and ten children to wear a life jacket. One was an eight year old from Kimberling City who wore her jacket to supper that night, announcing to her grandmother that she was a lake captain now.
On a warm afternoon in June, I sat in the stern of a gleaming blue bass boat that I had built in 1989, with Lacey at the wheel and Tom Cavanaugh in the bow, trailing a hand in the green water of Table Rock Lake. The bluffs rose around us, striped with sun. Lacey cut the engine, and the boat slid silently into a cove. Tom turned around, his tie loosened at last. “Delbert,” he said, “how about you build me one of these?” I laughed until my sides hurt. “You still owe me for the truck,” I said.
