I pried the lid off the blue cookie tin with my thumbnail and tipped it toward my daughter. There were no butter cookies inside. There never had been, not since Ruby bought the tin at a church sale in 1985. April leaned forward, her eyes wide, and the light from the chandelier fell across a small bundle of envelopes tied with kitchen string, a ring of keys, and a worn black notebook. “Daddy,” she whispered, “what is that?” I untied the string. The envelopes were all addressed in my own hand to Mrs. April Whitfield, at the address on Cloverdale Road where she used to live before she married. “Every one of them is a letter,” I said. “I wrote one a month for the eight months you did not visit. Jason returned them unopened.”
April took the top envelope with trembling fingers. It was stamped Return to Sender, in angry red ink. She turned it over. The flap was still sealed. “He told me they were bills,” she said, in a voice I could barely hear. “He said you were sending notices from collectors.” Jason sat in his chair with his arms folded, his smirk flickering like a faulty bulb. “Vernon, this is a family matter,” he said. “You are an old man who is confused. I was protecting my wife from your debts. I told you. Do not make a scene.” “I am not making a scene,” I said. “I am opening a tin.” I pushed the ring of keys across the tablecloth. “These are for April.”
She picked them up slowly. There were three keys on a copper ring, each tagged in my careful hand. “The first is for the house on Cloverdale Road, which I bought back from the people who owned it, for you, in September.” I smiled at her. “The second is for a safe deposit box at the bank on Dexter Avenue. The third is for the warehouse.” April stared at me. “Daddy, you sold the warehouse.” “I sold the business,” I said. “Eight million, eight hundred thousand dollars. I kept the building. I could not bear to see it empty.” I saw her look at Jason, and I saw the look he returned. It was the look of a man calculating how much he had lost.
A blue cookie tin that held no cookies opened at a Sunday dinner revealed letters, keys, and the records that ended a theft.
I opened the black notebook to a page marked with a ribbon. “This is a record,” I said. “From the Social Security Administration, from the post office, from the bank. Every check I sent you for eight years, with the dates and the numbers. Every one cashed. The signature is a close imitation of your handwriting, April. But it is not yours. I know because your handwriting slants to the left, like your mother.” April looked at the page. She put her fingers to her lips. “That is not my signature,” she said. “I have never seen that check.” She raised her eyes to her husband. “Jason, what is this?”
Jason pushed back his chair. “It is a clerical error,” he said. “Vernon is putting words in your head. He has always wanted to turn you against me.” “I did not change my mailing address at Social Security,” I said, evenly.
“A woman in Birmingham did, with a driver license in the name of Vernon Pruitt, issued in March of two years ago. The Social Security fraud unit is looking at the photograph now. I believe they will find it very interesting.” Jason went gray. “That is a federal crime,” he said hoarsely. “Yes,” I said. “I know. I looked it up.” For a long moment, nobody breathed. The grandfather clock in the hall struck seven.
April stood. She is a small woman, with the brown eyes of her mother, and I had never in her life seen her stand up to anyone. She took off her wedding ring and dropped it on the plate of fried chicken. It made a very small sound. “I will be staying with my father tonight,” she said. “And I would like you to leave this house, Jason. I am sorry, but I mean it.” He opened his mouth, but she did not wait. She walked around the table and stood behind my chair, and she put both hands on my shoulders, and I felt that they were shaking. “Daddy,” she said, “I am so sorry I believed him.” I covered her hand with mine.
Jason left that night. He was arrested at his office on Friday, charged with two counts of mail fraud, one of identity theft, and one of theft of government funds. He pleaded guilty in the winter and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison in Atlanta, with full restitution. The money he had taken from me came to sixty one thousand dollars, and it will take the rest of his life to repay. I do not take any pleasure in it. I lie awake some nights thinking of him as a boy somewhere, a child with a gift for talking, who was never taught to use it honestly.
April moved back into the house on Cloverdale Road in November. She planted tulips along the front walk. In the evenings she came to the warehouse, which smelled of peanuts and dust, and sat on a stool at my desk while I did the books. We did not talk much. Sometimes she leaned her head against my shoulder, as she did at six, and said nothing. Once, she asked me why I had written the letters, if I knew they would be returned. I told her that I wanted her to know, if she ever opened them, that I had never stopped trying.
In the spring, with the money from the sale, we transformed the warehouse into a community kitchen. It has long steel tables and big pots and an industrial oven, and every Saturday it feeds three hundred people, free, with boiled peanuts and cornbread and greens. April runs it. She calls it Ruby Table, and she has hung Ruby photograph on the wall by the door, in a plain wooden frame. The blue cookie tin sits on the shelf above the stove, and it is filled, at last, with butter cookies, which she bakes every Friday. On the first Saturday, I ate three. They tasted like 1985.
