“Hiding,” I read aloud, finishing the word that had trailed off at the bottom of the page, in a voice I hardly knew as mine. “I do not think it is our money she is hiding, Willie. I think it is somebody else. While the teller stepped away, I read the deposit slips on her counter. Sixty one thousand dollars, in eleven deposits, every one from a check written by the same office. Dr. Yoon Pediatrics, Clarksville. Stephanie keeps the books there.” Doris pressed my hand. I read the paragraph a second time. Ray had hidden this under fifty pounds of flour for three years and never once let on.
The rest of the letter was plain as Ray always was. “She opens an account in your name, Willie, with your driver license from the kitchen drawer, and she moves the money in and out of it, so that if anyone ever audits that doctor, the trail ends at an old woman who bakes biscuits. The key opens box 217 at the First Farmers bank on Franklin Street. I put the copies of the slips inside, and the name of the teller. Do not go alone. And do not let Gary hear it from anybody but you. He is a weak boy, but he is not a wicked one.”
I turned over the bank statement. Forty eight thousand, two hundred dollars, in an account I had never opened, at an address that was the old apartment of Gary. I sat very still. The kitchen clock ticked above the glass jars with their printed labels. Doris, who is seventy and has buried two husbands, kept her warm hand over mine and did not say a thing for a long time. Then she said, quietly, “Honey, you can cry first, and call the police second. Either order is fine with the Lord.”
A man can hide his love for forty years in a flour tin and still be right on time.
I did neither. I made a pot of coffee, and I waited for my son. When Gary came in from the hardware store that evening, smelling of sawdust, I laid the letter and the statement on the table in front of his chair. He read for a full minute. The color went out of his face the way water goes out of a tub. “Mama,” he said, “I did not know. I swear on Daddy. I thought the money for the house was from her mother.” Stephanie came in from the porch, saw the paper, and stopped dead in the doorway.
She did not try to lie. I will give her that. She sat down on the edge of a chair with her hands in her lap, and the story came out of her flat and tired, like a thing she had rehearsed for years in the dark. She had started small, a few hundred dollars from the office of the doctor for the car payment. Then a few thousand for the failed loan of Gary. Then it was easy. “I put it in your name, Wilma, because you never looked at anything,” she said. “I am sorry. I thought you would never know.”
On Monday, Doris drove the three of us to the First Farmers bank. Box 217 held exactly what Ray had promised: a folder of copies, in his careful block printing, and the name of the teller, Mrs. Beal, who remembered him. A detective named Marsh met us there. He listened, and he photographed every page, and he asked Dr. Yoon to come in from the clinic. The doctor, a small gray haired man, put on his glasses, read the slips, and sat down hard. “Sixty one thousand,” he whispered. “I thought the cash flow was tight.”
Stephanie was charged and pleaded guilty. She was ordered to repay the clinic through a long schedule, and she received three years of probation, because Dr. Yoon, to the surprise of the room, asked the judge to be lenient. Gary came to a decision of his own. He sold his truck, and put the money toward the debt, and told his wife he would stand by her but that the marriage would be rebuilt on the floor of the truth or not at all. She moved to the house of her sister in Nashville to think. I have not asked how it will end.
Doris called me on a Thursday. “Wilma, the rooster tins are still sitting in the back of the store,” she said. “Nobody has bought them. I think they are waiting for you.” I drove down. The tins stood on a shelf between a chipped teapot and a box of paperbacks, red roosters bright as the day Ray bought them. Doris rang them up at the register with great ceremony. “One dollar,” she said gravely. I paid her a dollar bill, and we both laughed until we had to hold the counter.
At home, I took the glass jars with their printed labels and carried them out to the porch, and Gary, who had said nothing all morning, loaded them in a box for the church sale. The canisters went back on the counter, in a row, flour and sugar and coffee and tea. I scooped fifty pounds of flour into the first one with the old tin scoop, and when I reached the bottom of the sack, a small fine cloud of white rose in the sun, and I was twenty three and Ray was holding the door.
On Sunday, I made biscuits. The whole house smelled like butter and Saturday. Gary ate six. He did not say much, but when he finished the last, he reached across the table and took my hand, flour and all, and held it. “Mama,” he said, “thank you for not throwing me out.” I told him the tin had been thrown out already, and look what it had brought home. On the counter, the roosters watched us from their row, red and proud, and I could almost hear Ray say, “Willie, that is the best batch yet.”