“Boat,” Mrs. Pickens finished, and the envelope trembled so hard in her hands that the paper whispered. “Mrs. Tidwell, tomorrow on the pontoon, after the fireworks, my daughter planned for you to fall. She said you would be tired, and a little unsteady, and nobody would think twice about an old woman going over the rail in the dark. She said the policy would pay double for an accident.” The cicadas hummed in the pines. I stood on my own porch, holding the cooler of my husband with both hands, and for a moment I could not remember how to breathe.
The man from the gray sedan introduced himself as Mr. Hollis, an investigator for the insurance company. He spoke gently, as one speaks to a person who has just received a blow. The policy on my life, he said, had been purchased online eleven weeks ago for half a million dollars. The signature was a skillful copy of mine. The first premium had been drawn from my own checking account, one of the fifty nine payments I had stopped. “We flagged it,” he said, “when the beneficiary changed to Mrs. Pickens just last Tuesday.”
Courtney had gone the color of ashes. She dropped the arm of Jimmy, and her hand hung in the air as if she were reaching for something that was no longer there. “Mama,” she said, so softly I barely heard, “what did you do?” Mrs. Pickens straightened. For the first time since I had known her, she looked like a woman who had decided something. “I did what I should have done when you were twelve and set fire to the neighbor shed,” she said. “I told the truth.” She turned and handed the envelope to the investigator. It held her written statement, three pages, signed and dated that morning.
A cooler of fried chicken can carry more forgiveness than a hundred apologies, if somebody finally learns to eat it.
Jimmy stood in my gravel drive with his hands hanging, sunburned and silent, like a man in the middle of a train wreck. When he spoke, his voice was a stranger. “Mom,” he said, “I signed something Courtney put in front of me in June. She said it was for the insurance on the boat. I did not read it.” He sank onto the porch step and covered his face. “I did not know. I swear to you, I did not know. But I did not ask. I never asked, Mom. I just let her handle everything, because it was easier.”
I believed him. A mother knows. I sat beside him on the step, and I set my hand on his sunburned neck, and for a long while we said nothing. The deputy who had pulled up behind the insurance sedan stood politely at the edge of the lawn, studying his boots. Bailey came up the steps with the foil pan of chicken and sat down on my other side, and the three of us formed a kind of bench on that porch while the world fell down around us. The cicadas did not stop.
Courtney was arrested that evening, in front of her mother and her husband and her stepdaughter, on charges of insurance fraud and conspiracy. She did not struggle. She said nothing at all. She looked back only once at the porch, and I saw something cross her face that I would not call remorse, but which might one day grow into it. She received six years, with the chance of parole in three. The twins went to live with Jimmy in the little rental he found near my house, and Mrs. Pickens took an apartment on the same street to help raise them.
Jimmy sold the lake house. He sold the boat and the boat slip, and the SUV, and every last toy that his wife had decided they must have. With the proceeds he paid off the debts of the trucking company and repaid me sixty thousand dollars, which I did not ask for. He took a job driving for a regional hauler. He is home every night by seven. He cooks supper for the twins on a two burner stove, and I hear he makes a very respectable pot of macaroni.
Mrs. Pickens came to my kitchen on the first Sunday of September. She did not ring. She stood on the back step with her purse held in both hands, as if it were a shield, and waited for me to notice her through the screen. I let her in. She was very thin. She set a pound cake on the counter, store bought, and apologized for that, too. “Mrs. Tidwell,” she said, “I laughed at your chicken. I want you to know it was the best I ever tasted. I was afraid to say so in front of my daughter.”
I handed her an apron. We stood side by side at the counter, two women of seventy and seventy seven, and I showed her how to brine the chicken the night before, and how to let the oil get hot enough before you lower the pieces, and how to listen for the little sizzle that says it is ready to turn. She was clumsy at it. She burned her thumb and said a word I did not know she knew. But when the first batch came out golden and crisp, she held a drumstick up to the window, and her eyes filled.
The following summer, we held the reunion on the dock of Lonnie, at the little lake where he used to fish for catfish. No boat, no bonfire, just folding chairs and a long table. Jimmy brought the twins. Bailey brought a boyfriend, a shy boy with a guitar. Mrs. Pickens brought a pie. I brought three skillets of chicken in the old red cooler. At the head of the table, in the evening light, I hung the fishing cap of Lonnie on the end of the dock post. The water was gold. “Lonnie,” I said, “everybody came.”
