“Kayla, you may tell my son that the camera is no longer in my kitchen,” I said, through the gap of the door, “and that I am not leaving my house.” She stared at me, and I stared back, and for a second neither of us breathed. Then I shut the door, slid the chain, and walked to the kitchen with my heart pounding like a woodpecker. Harold stood by the table with his laptop open, and on his face was something I had not seen in thirty years of church suppers. A grin. “Ruth Ann, I copied the files before you poured the wax,” he said. “All forty one days. And they are on my email, too.”
I sat down and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Harold phoned Vermont State Police in Shaftsbury, and then the bank, and then a woman named Maureen Kelleher, a lawyer in Bennington who had drawn up Armand will and mine. Maureen said she was getting into her car. The state trooper, Sergeant Reid, said he would be there in fifteen minutes. And the bank, at the fraud line, said that the fifty eight thousand dollar transfer to Greenmount Holdings could be stopped, and that it was in fact being stopped at that moment, with a hold on every account I owned.
Kayla was still on my porch when the cruiser turned in. She had not run. I think she did not know where to go. Sergeant Reid, a calm man with a gray mustache, climbed out and walked up the front steps and said, “Mrs. Pelletier, I understand you have a camera in the smoke detector,” and Kayla began to cry. Not the sweet crying she did on Tuesdays. The real kind. “It was not my idea,” she said. “Greg called me in January. He said he needed to know where his mother kept her money. He said he would pay me five hundred dollars a week.”
A memory card went into a candle, a transfer was stopped at dawn, and a barn on Route 9 lit up again for December.
Maureen Kelleher arrived in a green Subaru with a legal pad, took one look at the kitchen, and sat down at the table beside me. Over the next hour she read the camera files, the bank records, and the guardianship forms Greg had prepared, which he had actually filed with the Bennington probate court the previous Friday. She said it with a straight face, which I admired. “Ruth Ann, your son filed a petition alleging that you are incapacitated,” she said. “It is a serious matter. But there is a hearing next week, and the judge will see forty one days of you making oatmeal.”
Greg arrived at eight o clock that evening, in the dark, driving too fast up Route 9 from Albany. I heard the tires on the gravel before I saw the lights. I stood in the open kitchen doorway with Armand old flannel shirt over my shoulders, and my son came up the walk with his coat hanging open and his hands empty. He stopped at the bottom of the steps. “Mom,” he said. “I know about the camera. Kayla called me from the police station.” His voice was cracked and low. “Please let me tell you what happened.”
I let him in. We sat at the table under the little hole in the ceiling, and I made him a cup of tea, and I did not say a word. He told it all in order, as if reading from a ledger. He had borrowed against his house in Albany to buy into a restaurant that failed. He owed ninety four thousand dollars. He had invented Greenmount Holdings in the spring. “I told myself I would borrow your savings for six months and pay it back with interest,” he said. “I told myself you did not use it. I told myself it was a loan.” He covered his face. “Mom, I watched you cry on your anniversary. I watched you talk to Dad picture. And I did not turn it off.”
I did not forgive him that night. I would like to say I did, but the truth is that I sat in my kitchen and looked at my son, the boy I had taught to pour a pillar candle without bubbles, and I felt only a great, quiet tiredness. “Greg, you will withdraw the petition tomorrow morning,” I said. “You will repay every cent of what you took, and every hour of twenty six dollars that I paid Kayla out of my own pocket. And you will come to the market on Saturdays and stand at my table until I tell you otherwise.” He nodded, weeping. I noticed Harold at the door, looking at the floor.
The probate petition was dismissed with a single sentence by Judge Whitcomb on the following Wednesday. Kayla was charged with unlawful surveillance and conspiracy, and she pleaded and cooperated with the state. The agency that had sent her closed its doors in February. Greg sold the Albany house, repaid me in installments, and took a job as an adjuster in Rutland. On Saturdays at the Bennington farmers market, he stood beside me in a cold wind at a folding table, selling bayberry candles to strangers, and learning, slowly, the price of everything.
I reopened the barn that fall. Maple Hollow Candles, under new management, which meant me, Harold, and a rotating crew of retired neighbors who needed something to do with their hands. We poured nine hundred candles in November. One of them was new, a plain beeswax taper with a little blue ribbon, and we sold it for eight dollars with all proceeds to the Vermont elder fraud hotline. The label read, “Forty One Days.” Maureen bought the first dozen. By Christmas we had sold two thousand, and the story, I am told, had gone all the way to Burlington.
On Armand birthday in December I lit a bayberry taper on the kitchen table, under a brand new smoke detector, with no extra wires. Greg sat across from me in a flannel shirt. Neither of us said much. The flame stood straight in the still air. After a while he reached into his pocket and set a little brown paper bag on the table. Inside was an old brass candle snuffer that had belonged to Armand and gone missing from the barn two years before. “I took it,” he said. “I wanted something of Dad.” I took it from him, and I snuffed the candle, and I took his hand.
