“Blake Sutter is the grandson of Raymond Sutter,” Mr. Habersham said, and the whole kitchen went still. “My name is Wendell, Miss Odessa. I am eighty one, older than I look. In 1962 my father owned the Habersham Iron Works, and Raymond Sutter kept his books. On the fourteenth of March, six thousand five hundred dollars in wages for forty one workers sat in the study safe. That night the envelope vanished, and so did your mother skillet. I was seventeen, sitting on the stairs in my pajamas. I watched Raymond Sutter walk out of that study with the envelope inside his coat.”
“Then why did my mother never say a word?” I asked. “Because Raymond told my father that Ella took the money and the skillet both,” Wendell said. “My father did not believe it. But Raymond had friends at the bank, and my father was afraid. He paid the forty one workers out of his own pocket and nearly lost the foundry. Ella was let go that night with nothing.
She was told that if she spoke up, no kitchen in Savannah would hire her again. She took the skillet home, because it was hers, and she kept her silence for the rest of her life to keep her place at other tables.” He put his hand flat on the iron. “My father cast this skillet himself, the first one off the line, and stamped it H I W Number One. He gave it to Ella the week before, for nursing my mother through a fever.”
A grandmother in Savannah learned from a very old man that her mother skillet was a gift and that her grandson business partner came from a family of thieves, so the partner was arrested and the restaurant was saved.
“The skillet was a gift,” I whispered. “It was the only thing in that house that was rightfully hers,” Wendell said. “She said so to my father in the hallway, and I heard her. I kept my mouth shut for sixty four years, Miss Odessa. Raymond Sutter used that six thousand five hundred dollars to buy his first tavern on River Street, and from that tavern grew every dollar your grandson partner has ever bragged about. My father wrote out the truth in a letter in 1971, signed and witnessed.” He patted the pocket of his linen jacket. “I have carried it every day since my wife passed. I am eighty one, and I am finished being a coward.”
Jamal had gone gray in the face. He looked at me. “Grandma, did you know about Blake?” “I have seen him in the alley behind Broughton Street, baby, handing envelopes through car windows. I wanted so badly to be wrong. I prayed on it every night for a month, and I still did not know how to say it to you.” Behind me, Marco set down a hotel pan. “Señora, I have seen him too. Last month the men scared me, so I recorded them on my phone. I did not know who to show.” He held it up, and there were three clips, dated and clear, with the face of Blake under the yellow light of the alley lamp. Jamal took the phone as if it were made of glass. “Marco,” he said, “thank you. Go find Detective Gaines.”
Lorraine Gaines of the Savannah police had come as a guest, an old friend from the high school of Jamal. She was already standing at the swinging door with a plate of cornbread in her hand. Blake pushed in behind her, bourbon glass still in his fist. “Why is the dish pit holding court?” he said, smiling. Wendell rose from the milk crate on his cane. “Mr. Sutter, your grandfather stole six thousand five hundred dollars from my father in 1962, and I watched him do it.” Blake laughed. “Old man, you are confused.” Detective Gaines looked at the phone of Marco, then at the letter Wendell unfolded, and set down the plate. “Mr. Sutter, I think you and I should talk outside.”
They walked him out through the dining room, past the white tablecloths and the candles and the man from the newspaper, who forgot to put down his fork. By midnight Detective Gaines had a warrant for the black sedan parked behind the restaurant. Inside were scales, little envelopes and nineteen thousand dollars in rubber banded cash. Blake was charged the next morning.
The lawyer of Jamal, a woman named Ms. Dupree, found that Blake had put only eleven thousand dollars into the partnership of the ninety thousand he had promised, and the agreement gave the restaurant back to Jamal if a partner was ever charged with a felony. The newspaper ran the story on Sunday, under a photo of my mother skillet.
Wendell Habersham brought a check to my porch swing himself. Ninety thousand dollars, which he said was six thousand five hundred dollars in 1962 money with sixty four years of honest interest. “Ella earned it, and you are her family,” he said. His hand shook on the paper, and I held it steady for him, the way my mother once steadied the hand of his mother. I would not keep it for myself. We put forty thousand into the kitchen at Ella, and the rest into a scholarship at the culinary school in Charleston, in her name, for a cook from the west side of Savannah. Jamal also put my name on the paperwork as a partner with twenty percent. I told him I only wanted my pans back. He said, “Grandma, you can have both.”
We opened for real two weeks later, on a Friday. I wore the same white blouse and my mother cameo, and I sat at the corner table by the window with Wendell across from me, eating a pork chop he claimed was better than any he had eaten since 1962. Marco came out of the kitchen in a white coat of his own, newly promoted to line cook, and kissed my hand. On the wall by the door, Jamal hung a brass plate that reads, Ella Pinckney, who cooked for Savannah forty years. And on Sunday afternoons, the skillet is on the back burner, and I make the cornbread myself.
