I held the red tag in one hand and the credit union statement in the other, on the end of the Cherry Grove pier, with the gulls complaining and the cooler under me, and I read the name of the account holder out loud. Darlene Voss, Sea Mountain Highway. The mother of Dustin. I had met that woman four times in my life, and each time she had brought a platter of deviled eggs and told me what a fine mother I was. Marisa wept into her hands. “I called her last night,” she said. “She hung up on me.”
We drove that afternoon, the two of us, in my old truck with the windows down. The address was a yellow house with a plaster flamingo in the yard. Darlene opened the door with her hair in curlers and said she had no idea what we meant. Then I held out the statement. She read it, and her mouth made a small round shape, and she sat down hard on the stoop beside the flamingo. “He told me it was savings for the boys,” she said in a tiny voice. “He said Marisa was refinancing and it would be safer with me for a few weeks.”
She told it with her eyes on the grass. In April, Dustin had brought her a form at the kitchen table, and she had signed it without reading, because he was her son. She had never seen a statement. She had never touched a penny. “I have an eleven year old grandson,” she said. “I would cut off my hand before I robbed him.” She put her face in her apron. I sat down beside her on the step, and I did not say a word, because I have found that the best thing to say to a mother in that state is nothing at all.
The next morning, the three of us sat in the office of Mr. Huggins in Conway, with the fan turning overhead and a pitcher of tea on the desk. Darlene signed an affidavit in a hand that shook. Mr. Huggins called the family court and asked for an emergency freeze on the credit union account pending a hearing, and for an order allowing an inspection of the storage unit named on the key. He spoke into the telephone in the dry, patient voice of a man who has never lost his temper in forty years, and who has never needed to.
A mother who learns what her son has done does not have to choose between loving him and telling the truth.
Unit 47 sat at the back of a row of orange doors on Highway 9, two miles from my cottage. A deputy cut the lock with a pair of cutters and rolled up the door with a rattle. Inside, under a gray tarp, lay a brand new bass boat on a trailer, a jet ski still wearing its dealer tag, a case of good watches, and a small steel safe. In the safe were stacks of bills in rubber bands, twenty thousand dollars by the count of the deputy, and a green notebook with a title in the hand of Dustin. Plan B.
Mr. Huggins read the notebook standing in the doorway with the sun on his shoulders. It was a plan, in neat columns, for how to push my cottage into a forced split. The invoices for the improvements, which he proposed to invent. The name of a friendly appraiser. The date on which he should withdraw the funds and the order in which Marisa should be frightened. The last page was headed Mother in law, and had three words beneath it. Wear her down. Mr. Huggins closed it gently and handed it to the deputy as if it were a bird.
The hearing was in the second week of July, in a pale courtroom in Conway with a flag in the corner. The judge read the notebook. She read the statement. She read the affidavit of Darlene Voss, who sat in the front row in a navy dress, behind Marisa and not behind her son. When the lawyer of Dustin rose to speak, the judge held up one hand. He sat down again. The claim against my cottage was dismissed with prejudice. The eighty six thousand four hundred dollars was ordered returned in full to Marisa that day, and Dustin was held in contempt for the lie.
He sat at the table with a blank face, like a man waiting for a bus. When it was over, he turned in his chair and looked at his mother. She stood up very slowly. I thought she might go to him, and I would not have blamed her. Instead she crossed the room to the rail, and put her hand through, and laid it on the shoulder of Marisa. “I am so sorry, baby,” she said. “I would have given every penny of my life to stop it.” Marisa turned and put her arms around her. The judge looked away.
The money came to us by wire on Monday. Marisa stood at the window of my bait shop with her telephone held in both hands, reading the number. Then she handed it to me. I did not look. I said that the college fund of the boys would go back in the account where it belonged, and she nodded and wept. That fall, she and the boys moved into the cottage, because she was on her feet at last and I had a perfectly good apartment over the bait shop. The snowbirds from Dayton would have to wait until January.
In the evenings, the boys came running into the shop for free crickets, shouting and barefoot. The cast net of Earl still hung on its nail by the screen door, with the salt still in it, and they were forbidden to touch it. Of course they touched it. I let them. Darlene came on Sundays, with a covered dish of deviled eggs, and sat with me on the pier while the sun went down. We said very little. Two old women with sore knees and rods in our hands, and between us the thing neither of us could fix.
On the first anniversary of the day in the parking lot, I went out to the end of the Cherry Grove pier at sunrise with my cooler and two rods. I baited the second hook out of habit. The light came up pink, then gold, over the marsh, and the shrimp boats came in on the tide. Behind me I heard flip flops slapping the boards. I did not turn around. I knew the sound by heart. “Mama,” said my daughter, out of breath, laughing, “you left without me again.” I handed her the other rod.
