“Mr. Pauley, I will thank you not to touch my table,” I said. The tall man in the suit had reached for one of the reproductions, and his hand stopped in midair. I turned off the blacklight and turned the overhead light on, and the room came back, brown paneling, the afghan on the sofa, my husband recliner. Deputy Hensley sat with his hat on his knee. Ronnie stood in the doorway with his head down, my own son, a heavy man of forty nine in a Marshall University windbreaker, and I realized I could not remember the last time he had met my eye.
Mr. Pauley cleared his throat. He was, he said, an independent appraiser, retained by the family to evaluate my fitness to live alone. He had a clipboard and a list of questions. Did I know the date? Did I know the name of the governor? “It is the fourteenth,” I said. “The governor is Mr. Morrisey, and I did not vote for him.” I turned to the deputy. “Sir, what you are looking at is a man who has been paid to say I am confused. Look at the photograph in the front of his folder.” The deputy picked it up. It was Mama cabinet, with prices in red.
Deputy Hensley read the prices aloud. Cranberry pitcher, two thousand. Ruby hobnail basket, six hundred. Vaseline slipper, three hundred. “Mr. Pauley, this photograph was taken a year ago last March,” he said slowly. “Before Mrs. Kincaid supposedly became confused.” Pauley glanced at Tammy, who had gone the color of putty. “I merely appraise,” he said. “I was told the family wanted to preserve the value of the estate.” The deputy set the photograph on the table. “Preserve it,” he said, “by selling it to an auction house in Gallipolis under the name R and T Estate Services.”
A cheap blacklight exposed thirty one fakes, a deputy matched the heart chip to an auction photo, and a candy dish glowed green again.
Ronnie came into the room and sat down heavily on the end of the sofa. He put his elbows on his knees. “Mom, it started with the truck,” he said, in a low, flat voice. “I lost my job at the plant in the layoffs. Tammy said we could sell a few pieces and no one would ever know. A pitcher. Then a basket. I told myself you never looked at them anyway.” He rubbed his eyes. “Then it was thirty one. Then Tammy found out the Ona man had done it too, and she said we could do the same thing to him. Mom, I never wanted to say you were confused. That was her.”
Tammy snapped. “Ronnie, do not you dare put it on me,” she said, her voice cracking. “You carried every box to the car.” Deputy Hensley held up one hand. “Mrs. Kincaid, Mr. Kincaid, Ms. Kincaid,” he said gently. “I am going to ask all of you to come to the station voluntarily. I have two other families with similar complaints, and I think the sheriff will want to hear all of this on the record.” Tammy looked at me. For a moment I thought she would plead. Instead she picked up her purse, lifted her chin, and walked past me out the front door.
I sat in Dale recliner for a long time after they left. The house smelled of sweet tea and old glass. On the dining table, thirty one cheap yellow shapes sat in a row, and I thought, Mama, I am sorry. Then, very faintly, I heard the screen door. Ronnie. He stood in the front room with his cap in his hands. “Mom,” he said, “I would like to make this right. I do not know how. But I want to try.” I looked at my son, who was crying, and I told him to come and sit by me.
The sheriff office built a case in three weeks. R and T Estate Services had sold more than sixty items from eleven elderly families across three counties. The auction house in Gallipolis, once the deputy called, turned out to keep excellent records. They contacted every buyer. To my great surprise, nearly every one of them agreed to sell Mama pieces back for exactly what they had paid. A retired schoolteacher in Parkersburg drove up with the cranberry pitcher in a quilted bag and refused my check. “Mrs. Kincaid,” she said, “I saw your picture in the paper. I would rather you had it than me.”
Tammy pleaded guilty to fraud and elder exploitation, and received a sentence of five years, suspended to two years of probation and full restitution. She moved to her sister house in Charleston. Ronnie pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and was ordered to do three hundred hours of service. I asked the court to place him at the Blenko Glass visitor center in Milton, which had needed a guide for years. He stood in a gift shop apron beside the furnaces and told schoolchildren how his father had made glass. Dale would have enjoyed every word.
We put the pieces back in the walnut cabinet, one at a time, Ronnie and I, on a Saturday in April. We did it by hand with a flannel cloth. The pitcher with the heart shaped chip came last. When it was in place, he stepped back and looked at the shelf. “Mom, they are beautiful,” he said, and then, shyly, “I never really saw them.” I told him no one does until they hold one up to the light. I took down the Vaseline candy dish from the middle shelf, and I handed it to him, and I plugged in my grandson blacklight.
The dish glowed green. A deep, shimmering, lightning bug green, as bright as it had been the week my father came home. Ronnie held it in both hands, and his face was lit from below, like a boy at a campfire. I opened the cupboard and took out a bag of peppermints. We put them in the dish together. “Mama kept them here for forty years,” I said. He took one, unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. We stood in the front room in the green light, two grown people sucking peppermints, and for a while neither of us said a word.
