I drove to Myrtle Beach the next morning in my old Buick with my pocketbook in my lap and no word to anyone, past the peach stands and the fireworks tents on Highway 501, and I was in the lobby of the Ocean Reef by eleven. Mr. Sutton came around his desk to shake my hand with both of his. He was a tall, courtly man of sixty with a silver mustache. “Mrs. Pittman,” he said, “I want to show you something in my office. I want you to sit down first.” He closed the door and turned the monitor to face me, and he pressed a key.
The woman in the film was seventy or so, in a straw hat and a flowered blouse, with sunglasses on her head. She was handing a driver license across the desk to the clerk, and she was smiling, and in the smile I saw something terribly familiar. It was the face of Verna Rudd, the mother of my daughter in law Tonya. I had sat across from her at a church supper. The license, Mr. Sutton explained, was mine, with a photograph altered by hand, and next to Verna, with a rolling suitcase and a sunburned nose, stood my son Roger.
I sat there for a long time. Mr. Sutton did not say anything. Then he told me the rest, as gently as he could. Since May, the unit on the ninth floor and the one on the third had been rented out by the week to tourists on the internet, under my name, for a total of nineteen thousand four hundred dollars. The money went to an account in Tonya name. The forged deed had gone through the Horry County office on a Friday afternoon. The notary was a girl who had been paid fifty dollars. “Mrs. Pittman,” he said, “they are on the ninth floor right now.”
A beach week the family had been told was cancelled gave one retired payroll clerk the length of a single drive to bring her son back to the truth in Myrtle Beach.
I gave my terms to Mr. Sutton in his office, with my hand flat on his desk, in the voice I used for forty one years at the payroll window of the Springs mill. He would not call the police until I said. He would call the ninth floor and ask my son and his wife to come down to the lobby for an urgent matter regarding their reservation. And he would have a chair brought for me, near the front desk, where I could see the elevators. Mr. Sutton smiled under his mustache. “Mrs. Pittman,” he said, “I believe my mother would have liked you.”
They came off the elevator in beach clothes, Roger in a flowered shirt and Tonya in a white cover up, with matching sunglasses. They saw me in the chair. They stopped like two people who have walked into a glass door. “Mama,” said Roger, “what are you doing here?” I said, “I came to see my week.” Tonya laughed a thin, high laugh and said it was a misunderstanding. Mr. Sutton laid the film printouts on the desk. Roger looked at his mother in law face in the picture and his shoulders dropped, and he began, in a low voice, to tell the story.
The lawn care business was losing money, he said. The truck payments, the house in Fort Mill, the boat. Tonya had a plan: the timeshare was empty most of the year, and nobody would miss it. They had thought they could rent it out and pay the maintenance and keep the rest. “Mama, we were going to put it back,” he said. “We just needed one summer.” Tonya snatched the deed copy from the desk, meaning to run across the lobby and out through the revolving door to the parking deck, and she dashed over the marble in her flip flops with the paper held over her head.
She never reached the revolving door. A housekeeper named Marisela had just finished mopping the long lobby floor, and had set out the yellow wet floor sign, and was standing quietly beside her bucket. Tonya hit the wet marble at a full run and her flip flops went out from under her. She skated forty feet across the lobby on her back, with the deed in the air, and came to rest against a potted palm with her sunglasses over her ear. Marisela looked at her. She said, “Madam, I put out the sign.”
Tonya lay under the palm and stared at the ceiling fans. A little girl in a swimsuit, checking in with her parents, giggled. Then Tonya laughed too, in spite of herself, and began to cry, and Roger knelt beside her on the wet floor and took her hand. Mr. Sutton helped them both up. “Mrs. Pittman,” he said, “the Horry County clerk is a friend of mine. A forged deed is a void deed.” I said I wished to press nothing. I said I wished to make them listen. Then I took out the deviled eggs I had brought in a Tupperware, and I handed one to each of them.
In the name of Ernest, who passed in 2020, I started the Ernest Pittman Fund. It pays for a week at the beach, with a condo, gas and groceries, for grandparents raising grandchildren and widows who have never seen the ocean, in York, Chester and Lancaster counties. In the first year we sent eighty one families. A woman of seventy nine, from Chester, who had never in her life gone farther than Columbia, walked into the surf up to her knees in her church dress, and held her great grandson up over the foam, and screamed like a girl.
The first full week of July, Week 27, my whole family stays on the ninth floor of the Ocean Reef, in unit 914, the same blue railing, the same view of the pier. Roger grills on the pool deck. Tonya makes margaritas for the grown ups and lemonade for the children. On the Fourth, we sit on the balcony and watch the fireworks go up over the ocean. At six in the morning, I walk down to the Krispy Kreme, as Ernest did, and I carry back four dozen. Nobody has ever asked me why.