“Kyle,” Sherry said again, and the pool filter hummed behind her in the sudden silence, “why is your name on the bank account of my mother?” He smiled the way a man smiles when he has been caught with a hand in a cookie jar and has decided to carry it off. “Honey,” he said, “it is a joint account for her protection. Norma has trouble with her eyes. I handle the money. We talked about it.” “We did not talk about it,” I said. “I bank at the credit union. I have never been to Fifth Third in my life.” I took the pink bib off the table and smoothed it between my fingers. “Ms. Patel at the baby company says that account received forty one thousand dollars every quarter for three years.”
Nobody at the table breathed. Twenty relatives sat around the long glass patio table in the golden evening, in their good shirts, with their paper plates of birthday cake going soft. My granddaughter Emma, who is fourteen, had her phone halfway up and was filming without even trying to hide it. Sherry took the envelope from the table and read the account statement, line by line, her finger moving down the page. The deposits. The withdrawals. A boat dealer in Angola, Indiana. A pool contractor. A jeweler. A line on the bottom that said, in capital letters, TRANSFER TO PERSONAL.
“Twelve quarters,” Sherry said. Her voice had gone to ice. “Four hundred ninety two thousand dollars.” She looked at the pool, the new brick patio, the boat in the driveway with its blue tarp. “You told me the bonus from the dealership paid for the house,” she said. “You told me your commissions were up.” “Sherry,” said Kyle, “do not do this in front of your mother.” “In front of my mother,” she said, “is exactly where I am going to do it.” She turned to me. Her eyes were swimming. “Mama, I swear to you on my children, I did not know.”
A little pink bib on a birthday table and one envelope from a bank turned a family toast into the end of a three year theft.
“I believe you, honey,” I said, and I did. I had known my daughter for forty six years, and she had never been able to lie, not even at six, not even to hide a broken lamp. I stood up, and everyone stared, because I am a small woman and I do not usually stand up at my own birthday. “Kyle,” I said, “I am not going to shout. I have one question. For three years you told me my royalties had dried up. You let me sell my crocheted coasters at the church fair to pay for my heating oil. You called me the bib lady, in front of the whole family, every Sunday. Why?” He opened his mouth. He closed it. “Because I could,” he said, very softly, and the cruelty of it was so honest that it silenced the yard.
The baby company was not going to wait for the family to finish its argument. Ms. Patel had already made a call, and a woman from the office of the attorney general was waiting at the end of the driveway in a gray sedan. A detective from the Allen County Sheriff Department joined her. They did not rush. They walked up the brick path together, past the hydrangeas, and the detective said, “Mr. Pruitt, we would like to speak to you about the account.” Kyle stood. He looked at Sherry. He looked at the boat. Then he followed them down the path without a word, in his pressed khaki shorts and his birthday party polo.
Sherry did not run after him. She sat down at the table with her face in her hands, and my granddaughter went around and put her arms around her mother. I said nothing for a long time. At last I took a napkin and wiped a smear of frosting from the corner of her mouth, as I had when she was little. “We will get through this,” I said. “You are not alone.” She nodded into my shoulder. “Mama, I have been so stupid.” “You were trusting,” I said. “It is not the same thing. It is a fault only in a world that does not deserve you.”
The legal part took ten months. The boat was sold. The house, which was in the name of Kyle alone, was put on the market and brought in a little over six hundred thousand dollars, enough to repay most of what he had taken. Sherry kept a small portion for herself and the children, and moved into a two bedroom rental in my neighborhood. Ms. Patel rerouted the final payment of the patent sale, seven point nine million dollars, into a trust account at my credit union, with Sherry as a signer, in case anything happened to me. Kyle took a plea and received three years.
The money did not change me, but it did let me do a few things I had always wanted. I paid off the church roof. I bought a dozen new sewing machines for the craft fair and donated them to the high school. I set up a scholarship in the name of my husband for girls who want to study design. And I hired a lawyer to make certain that, from now on, the royalties of Norma Jean Schultz go only to Norma Jean Schultz.
At the Christmas craft fair at Saint Mary, I set up my table as I have for thirty years. Pink bibs, blue bibs, striped bibs, bibs with ducks. A small hand lettered sign in front said, THE BIB LADY. A line of young mothers formed at nine in the morning, and one of them, a pregnant woman with a fresh perm, recognized me. “You are the one,” she said, “who invented the pocket bib!” I admitted that I was. She had her phone out, to take a photograph. For the first time in my life, I did not feel embarrassed.
That evening, after the fair, Sherry and I drove home through the snow with the leftover bibs in the back seat. She was quiet. At a red light on Coldwater Road she said, “Mama, I want to learn to sew.” I said I had a spare treadle machine. “It is the same one my mother taught me on,” I said. “It is a bit stubborn.” She laughed, and the light turned green. We spent Sunday afternoons all winter at the kitchen table, her fingers learning the feed of the cloth, and she sewed her first pocket bib in January, a little crooked, a little pink, the stitches perfectly wrong, and it is the finest thing I own.
