Kyle laughed. It was the laugh I have heard at every family dinner since 2010, the laugh of a man who has never once been caught. “Michelle, honey, these checks were for your father. Everybody knows Hank was too proud to ask. We were helping.” “Helping,” Earl said, from right behind him, in the voice of a man who had been a rigger and a shrimper and had never been fooled by a salesman. “Boy, you told me he was three months from foreclosure. You told me he cried in the kitchen.” “I have not cried since 1984,” I said. “The shark was just very large.” A few people laughed, uneasily.
I took the second paper from the folder and handed it to my daughter. “Read the first line,” I said. She did. Her lips moved. Then her hand went to her mouth, and she looked up at me with the eyes of her mother. “Daddy, nineteen million dollars?” “In June,” I said. “For the shop, the lot, and the beach access. I signed in Houston. I was going to tell you on your birthday.” A murmur went around the pier like wind in a sail. Behind Kyle, someone dropped a plate of hush puppies.
The face of Kyle did something remarkable. It went red, then white, then a strange sort of yellow. “Hank,” he said, “why did you not tell me? I could have helped you structure it. I could have set up an LLC.” “You could have set up a vacation for yourself,” I said. At that moment the banker, Mr. Teague, a short man in a seersucker suit, who had been eating a piece of redfish at the edge of the crowd, stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Mr. Bennett,” he said, “I would like to speak with you about the letter you brought to my office.”
A fish fry farewell for a bait shop turned into a reckoning when nine old friends and one folder met on a picnic table.
Kyle sagged. There is no other word. He looked around the pier at three hundred faces, at nine people who had trusted him, and I watched the shine go out of him like air from a tire. “I was going to pay it back,” he said. “The timeshare deal fell through. I owed a man in Houston forty thousand dollars. If I refinanced the shop, I could clear it, and you would sell it anyway one day. You are seventy one. I thought I was just moving up the timeline.” Michelle stared at her husband. “You borrowed money from Earl,” she said. “Earl is eighty.”
I did not wait for her to say more. I took my checkbook out of my jacket, and in front of the whole crowd I wrote nine checks, one after another, on the picnic table, each to a friend of mine. The amount of each was what Kyle had taken, with five percent added for the trouble. Earl tried to refuse his. I pushed it into his shirt pocket. “You fished off my pier for fifty years,” I said. “You are not going to be out two hundred dollars because my son in law is a bum.” The crowd cheered, and then, remembering where they were, quieted again.
Kyle apologized to each of them in turn. I made him. He went down the line, nine people, shaking hands, looking each one in the eye. A retired shrimper named Dewey said, “I would not give you a dime if you were on fire.” A widow in a floral dress took his face in her hands and said, “Young man, you are a better person than this, and God knows it.” And Earl, when his turn came, clapped him on the arm and said, “Boy, you can borrow a worm from me anytime. But never a dime.” Even Kyle laughed. It sounded like a cough, but it was something.
That night, in my kitchen, Michelle sat across from me with her head in her hands. “I did not know, Daddy,” she said. “I swear. He said the money was coming from his commissions.” “I believe you,” I said. “I have known you since you were born. You could not lie to save your life.” She nodded slowly. “I am going to ask him to move out,” she said. “For a while. Until he gets help.” “Whatever you decide,” I said, “I will be on your side. And so will your mother, wherever she is.” She wept, and I held her, and the old kitchen clock ticked.
The sale closed in July, and I did something with the money that I think my father would have understood. The hotel agreed to build a public fishing pier at the foot of the lot, free to anyone, forever, with a bait stand run by a local family. I put a million dollars into a fund for kids who want to learn to fish, and another into a scholarship for charter boat captains. And I asked for just one thing in the contract: that the shark jaw I caught in 1984 hang in the lobby, over the front door, where everybody could see it.
On the eleventh of October, Michelle turned thirty six. I gave her a box with a bow. Inside was an old brass key. “To the shop?” she said, laughing. “To the pier,” I said. “Your own bait stand. If you want it.” She did. She has run it ever since, with her hair tied back and a cooler of Dr Pepper in the shade, and the tourists take pictures of her with the shark jaw over her head. She works fourteen hours a day, and she looks happier than I have seen her since the funeral of her mother.
Kyle came back in the spring. He did not wear a suit. He worked the dock for six months, hauling ice, baiting hooks, and learning to be quiet. Nobody greeted him warmly, and he did not ask them to. In September he handed me a check for the last of what he owed Earl, and Earl, who was eighty one, shook his hand. Michelle has not decided whether to take him back. I did not tell her to. But I noticed that she brings him a thermos of coffee every morning, and that he says thank you, and means it.