“To open,” Reverend Hollis finished, and he put on his glasses to read from the ledger. “Mrs. Hensley, your daughter in law used your name and your Social Security number to open four additional accounts: two at banks, one credit line, and a church building fund that does not exist. Over five years, she moved ninety four thousand dollars through them.” The treasurer, Mrs. Doyle, stepped forward and handed me a stapled packet. It listed every account, with the dates and the sums. The signature on each application was a patient imitation of mine, with the little hook on the H that I add to hide the shake.
I recognized the hook. Brooke, holding baby Noah against her shoulder, swayed from foot to foot, and the child, wrapped in the blanket I had knitted, slept through all of it as only a baby can. Tiffany did not deny it. She stood by the car with her pink dress wrinkled and her white heels sunk in my gravel, and she gave a long shuddering breath. “It was only borrowing,” she said softly, to nobody. “The factory closed. I could not tell my church friends. I could not tell anyone we were poor. So I made us appear as though we were not.”
Mark made a sound like a man struck in the chest. “Tiffany,” he said, “I paid the tithe myself, from the cash I earned at the hardware store. You told me it was handled.” She did not answer. The wind moved the tin roof of the carport, and a mourning dove cooed in the oak by the road. Reverend Hollis took his hat off and held it against his chest like a man at a graveside. “Mrs. Hensley,” he said, “I came here because I could not carry this ledger back to the church without first putting it in your hands.”
A christening gown passed down for seventy years is strong enough to carry a family through one bad chapter.
Brooke came up the steps with the baby and sat beside me on the swing. She did not say anything. She leaned her head against my shoulder, as she did at nine, when her parents fought, and the baby cooed in the folds of the blanket. I put my arm around the two of them, my granddaughter and her son, my great grandson with his tiny fist curled in the wool. “Grandma,” she whispered, “I am so ashamed of my mother.” I said, “Honey, you are not responsible for the sins of your mother. That is what the font is for.”
Reverend Hollis, who is a wise man, did not call the police. He asked me first what I wished. I said I wished for my name back, and my money, and my family in one piece, in that order, and that I was not sure they could all be had. He nodded slowly. “Mrs. Hensley,” he said, “I can promise the first. I can pray for the third. The second will take some doing.” And it did. The banks closed the accounts as fraud. Tiffany repaid sixty one thousand dollars over six years, from a job at a dental office, in monthly installments, with a church deacon holding the schedule.
Mark moved into a trailer at the edge of town for a spell. He took a night shift at the grain elevator, and he went to church on Wednesdays and sat in the back pew in a clean shirt. I watched him from my seat in the middle, once, and I saw that his shoulders were no longer the shoulders of a boy. He wrote me a letter in October, on lined paper, in ballpoint pen, four pages long. I will not repeat what he wrote. The last line was, I am trying to be the son Dad would have liked.
Tiffany did not move out. That is the surprise. She stayed in the house, and she took the job, and she went to the wife of the pastor for counsel every Monday. She also came to see me, on a Thursday in the spring, with a pound cake from a box mix, which I will confess was dreadful. She sat at my table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea. “Mrs. Hensley,” she said, “I do not expect you to forgive me. But I would be grateful if you would teach me to make a christening cake.” I nodded. I did not say yes. I said, “Bring flour.”
The baptism of Noah was held on the first Sunday in June, at the Methodist church in Rolla, with the sun pouring through the old windows like warm honey. Brooke wore blue. Mark stood beside her. Tiffany sat in the third pew with her gloved hands in her lap and did not try to be anywhere near the front. I carried the christening gown, the one worn by every baby in the family since 1949, and Brooke laid Noah in my arms so that I could dress him myself.
I held him at the font. He weighed no heavier than a loaf of bread. The Reverend poured the water, three times, and the baby opened his eyes and gazed straight at me with the grave astonishment of a person who has been woken to a new world. I smoothed his hair. The satin bow tie I had bought was too big, and Brooke had pinned it with a safety pin, and it hung crooked on his tiny collar. I have never in my life seen anything so beautiful.
Afterward, in the fellowship hall, Tiffany came to me carrying a plate of cake. It was a christening cake, white and tall and slightly lopsided. She had baked it herself. She said nothing. She set the plate before me and stood with her hands folded, like a child waiting for a verdict. I picked up a fork and cut a bite and tasted it. It was sweet, and a little dense, and honest. “Tiffany,” I said, “it needs vanilla.” She started to laugh, and then to cry, and I laughed too, and the church ladies pretended not to see.