The man next to Leanne was Grant, my son in law. Ed did not need to say it again. He set down his bowl and spoke loudly enough for the tent to hear. “Grant, you had your lawyer call my office, and I recorded that call, as I record all of them.” The guitar player stopped. Grant came across the lawn with his hands out like a man calming a horse. “Uncle Ed, this is not the place.” Ed pulled out his phone and said, “It is exactly the place. You are standing in front of the woman you tried to have declared unfit.” Forty guests went quiet.
Leanne laughed, a thin laugh. “Mom, what is he talking about?” I wiped the hot fudge from my wrists with a paper napkin, one finger at a time, and took off the caterer apron and folded it over the rail of the sundae bar. “He is talking about my business, Leanne. The one you told your friends was in Baltimore.” I looked at Grant. “How long have you owed money, dear?” He opened his mouth and nothing came out. Ed answered for him. “Three hundred and ten thousand dollars on a boat and a bad investment in Delaware. He told my lawyer so himself.”
Here is how it fit together, as Ed explained it over the next ten minutes, standing beside the cake. Grant had learned from a friend at the title company in Salisbury that Kalb Creamery had sold. He assumed the money would sit in my account for months. He wanted a court to name Leanne my conservator, which would put the whole five million eight hundred thousand dollars in her hands, and he needed two or three old business friends to say I had been slipping. Ed was the first man he asked. Ed said he almost laughed out loud, and he kept the recording running because he could not believe it.
A recorded phone call and a doctor letter exposed a plot to call a boardwalk ice cream queen confused, and a grandson picked up the scoop beside her.
I was not worried, I told the tent, and I meant it. Before I signed that sale in Salisbury, my lawyer had insisted I see my doctor and a neurologist at Peninsula Regional, and both had written letters saying my mind was sharper than their own. I had the papers in my handbag, because Carmen told me to carry them everywhere. I took them out and handed them to Mason, my grandson, who read them aloud in his officer voice. Then he handed them back, turned to his mother, and said very calmly, “Mom, did you know about this?” Leanne did not answer him. She stared at her shoes.
Grant tried once more. “Rosemary, we were only thinking of your protection.” Mason stepped between us. “Dad, no. Grandma raised nine stores while you were selling pills and bragging about a boat. Do not say her name like that.” Then the boss of Grant, the man who had given me the pitying nod earlier, put down his drink and said he believed he would be going home. A few guests did the same. Within five minutes the tent had thinned to family, a caterer, and the guitar player, who packed up his amplifier with his head down, wiser about the matter than most.
Leanne finally sat on a folding chair. She cried the way she cried at six years old, with her whole face. “Mom, I did not know about the lawyer. I swear. Grant said you needed help with the money. I thought I was being a good daughter.” I knelt beside her, which at seventy eight was an adventure. “You never asked what I did, Leanne. You never once came to the 9th Street store. If you had, you would have seen your name on the wall of the back office, painted by your father the day you were born.” She covered her mouth with both hands.
Mason walked me out to my car through the quiet lawn, still in his dress whites, and he did not say a word until we reached the Buick. Then he stood at attention and saluted me, a real one, the way his grandfather taught him. “Grandma, I have been ashamed of how I let them talk about you for years,” he said. “Not anymore.” I hugged him hard, hot fudge and all. He asked if he could keep the anchor pin safe for me while it was cleaned, and I said he could keep it for as long as he liked, because the right sailor had finally asked.
The next week was a busy one. The recording of Ed went to the attorney in Salisbury, who sent a letter to the lawyer of Grant. The boat was sold quietly. Grant moved into an apartment in Glen Burnie and took a job at a medical supply warehouse, and I will say that I did not lose a minute of sleep over it. Leanne came to my cottage in Berlin on Saturday morning in jeans, no makeup, carrying a pie from a bakery, and asked whether I would teach her the peach recipe. I looked at her for a long moment. Then I said, “Bring an apron.”
I also kept an old promise to Augie. With the franchise money I set aside one million dollars for the Kalb Scholarship, to help boardwalk employees and their children go to college, and Carmen cut the first check with tears running down her neck. Mason, who would soon be a Navy ensign, asked to be on the board. Ed Truitt joined as well, and sold the fund a new batch freezer at cost, as his father would have wanted. We toasted the whole thing in the back of the 9th Street store, with peach ice cream in paper cups and the old pink and white aprons hanging on their hooks.
On the first Sunday of June, Leanne drove down to Ocean City to scoop with me. She wore the apron with my name stitched on it, a little loose around the middle, and stood beside me at the counter for four hours while the line curled past the arcade. She dropped three cones and giggled each time. When the sun slipped down behind the Ferris wheel, she turned to me and said, “Mom, this is what you were for.” At home that night, the wind chime of old scoops rang on my screened porch, and I thought Augie would be pleased.
