“I do, Mr. Riddle,” I said, and I laid my hand on the deed. “I bought this house in July, through a company I named for the river behind it. I also sold Lookout Hosiery in June, the mill, the machines and the brand, for eight million one hundred thousand dollars. I told no one, because I wanted to see how my daughter treated her mother when she thought all she had was a back bedroom and a box of socks.” The father of Colby read the deed twice. Out the window, the sun was going down over Little River Canyon, and the whole mountain glowed the color of a ripe peach.
Shelly found her voice slowly. “Mom, you do not understand. The coins were not worth anything. I only wanted to save you the trouble.” “The dealer in Chattanooga paid you twenty two thousand dollars, honey,” I said. “He wrote you a check. He still has a picture of the dime.” I slid the receipt across the table. “Your daddy found that Mercury dime in a church collection plate when he was nine years old. He kept it in a blue folder for sixty one years. He kept it for you, Shelly. I would have given it to you for nothing if you had only asked.”
Colby put his fork down carefully. “Shelly, the hot tub. You said the money came from your tax refund.” “It was a refund, Colby,” Shelly said weakly. “From what?” he asked. She did not answer. His father laid the receipt flat on the cloth and smoothed it with his thumb. “Daughter,” he said quietly, “I have raised four children, and I know what a lie sounds like at supper. I do not want my son in a house where it is told.” Nobody moved. I took the single Indian Head penny from my coin purse, the only one she had missed, and set it beside the dish of banana pudding.
An Indian Head penny from a cigar box of coins gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the kitchen in Fort Payne.
I spoke slowly, so that no word could be mistaken. “Here are my terms, Shelly. You will give me the twenty two thousand dollars, every cent of it, in payments that I will set, from your own pay. You will sell the hot tub on Monday. You will call the dealer in Chattanooga and ask whether he still has any of the coins, and if he does, you will help me buy them back. And you will tell Colby and his parents the truth, tonight, once, plainly. If you do all that, I will not say another word about it. I would rather have a daughter than a grievance.” Shelly nodded and began to cry.
On Saturday morning I drove to Chattanooga, and I found a surprise waiting. The dealer, a bald and gentle man named Mr. Pruett, had the blue folders laid out on his counter on a square of black velvet. Almost everything was there. He had not sold a single coin. He took off his glasses and said, “Mrs. Haygood, when your daughter brought them, I thought, a woman does not carry sixty years of love into a shop for twenty two thousand dollars unless something is wrong. I put them in the back and waited.” He held up the 1916 D Mercury dime between two fingers.
The money consequences came quickly. Mr. Pruett agreed to sell the collection back for exactly what he had paid, with no profit, and Shelly had to borrow against her car to find the money. She sold the hot tub at a loss of three thousand dollars. The father of Colby, who had offered to help the couple buy a bigger house in Rainsville, withdrew the offer until he could see a year of honest work. Shelly took on extra shifts at the clinic where she worked, and for the first time in her life she kept a ledger of what came in and what went out, in pencil, on a yellow pad.
I did not want to be bitter, because Grady would not have liked it. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in his name. The Grady Haygood Fund pays for the winter heating bills of retired mill workers in DeKalb County who cannot afford to stay warm. Every Christmas, I deliver a pair of thick wool socks with each check, knitted at the last mill in town. Last year we helped ninety eight households. An old man in Hammondville met me at his door and held the socks against his face. “Miss Ozella,” he said, “I worked on that machine in nineteen seventy eight.”
Colby came to see me alone on a Sunday afternoon, carrying a basket of tomatoes from the garden of his father. He sat at my kitchen table and said he was sorry he had not asked questions, and sorrier that he had sat there while Shelly lied to me. I told him that a good man does not need to be perfect, only honest. We drank iced tea and talked about fishing and the canyon and the old days when Fort Payne had a sock factory on every corner. By the end of the afternoon, he was telling me stories about his grandfather, and I was telling him mine.
Shelly came to the mill on the first Monday at five in the morning, as I had asked. The new owners had kept the knitting machines running, and the foreman handed her an apron and a clipboard. For six hours she stood on the line, counting tube socks as they came off the machine and tucking them into bundles of twelve. By noon her feet ached and her back was sore. At lunch she sat on a crate with a sandwich and looked at the rows of whirring needles. “Mom,” she said, “I never knew what Daddy and you did all those years.” I said, “Now you do.”
On a bright Saturday in October, the family gathered on the porch of the house by the river. The coins were laid out on the table in their blue folders, and Shelly opened the cigar box and set the Mercury dime in its slot with trembling fingers. Colby stood behind her with a hand on her shoulder. Out on the water, a heron stood in the shallows, and the sun came gold through the maples. I picked up the single Indian Head penny and placed it in her palm. “Your father would be proud,” I said, “because you are carrying it now.” She closed her fingers around it and wept.
