“Ashley, you may come in,” I said into the phone, “but you will wait on the porch, and you will not touch the door.” Then I called Judge Harmon. He answered on the fourth ring in the voice of a man who has been retired for nine years and is glad to be woken. “Lorraine, I will be there in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Do not open it.” I put the box on the kitchen table, turned on every light in the house, and sat down to wait. Out on the porch Ashley stood with her arms crossed, looking at the river, and not one word did she say.
Judge Harmon came in a cardigan over pajamas, carrying a flashlight and a leather satchel. Tyrell, my foreman, came behind him, because the judge had telephoned him too, and Tyrell had on one boot and one slipper. Derek arrived last, white as chalk, and stood in the doorway of my kitchen looking at the box. Nobody sat. The judge looked at the epoxy, at the orange line with Frank knot, and nodded. “All right, Lorraine,” he said. “Frank asked me to be in this room. I am in it.” He handed me a small knife from his satchel. My hands steadied as I cut.
Inside, wrapped in an oilcloth, were three things. A state grant for the first acre of river bottom, recorded in 1978, in my name alone. A page torn from a ledger, with a column of numbers and the words Derek, paid. And a letter in Frank blocky print. The judge read the grant first. “Lorraine, this acre was never part of the sale,” he said. “It was never in the corporation. It never belonged to Bowditch Bay Oysters at all. It has been yours the whole time, and the Boston company does not own a cup of it.” Derek made a sound like air leaving a tire.
A barnacled steel box was opened in front of a judge, a son came home with empty hands, and a Denny coupon book found its use.
I read the letter out loud. “Lorrie, if you are reading this, our boy has come looking. I want you to know I covered his debt in 2014. Ninety thousand dollars. He gambled it, and I paid it, and I never told you because I was ashamed to have raised a boy who would. The first acre is yours and nobody else. If Derek comes to you with his hands empty and his head down, the door is open. If he comes with a lawyer and a flamingo, the door is shut. Love you to the bottom of the bay. Frank.” The kitchen was silent, but for the refrigerator.
Ashley had come in without anyone seeing. She stood by the stove with her flamingo key ring in her fist. “Derek told me it was a hidden pension,” she said, in a voice like paper. “He said you would lose everything if the government found it. I believed him.” I asked her whether the buyer with the cash offer was a friend, and she shook her head. It was a developer from Annapolis who wanted the waterfront for twenty four condominiums. They were to pay Derek two hundred thousand dollars to arrange the power of attorney. A power of attorney I had never signed, drafted and notarized by a man in Easton.
After Judge Harmon and Tyrell went home, Derek and I sat at the table until the tea went cold. He told me about the debts and the nights he could not sleep. I told him about Frank, who had worn his shame like a wet coat for ten years, and never once let it show. Derek asked me whether his father had been angry. I said, no, son, he had been afraid. Those two are not the same, and one day you will be old enough to tell them apart. He put his forehead down on the table, next to the steel box, and stayed there.
Judge Harmon made one telephone call, to a state police sergeant he used to sit beside on the bench. By morning the notary in Easton had a visit, and the developer had withdrawn his offer in a hurry. Derek stood at my kitchen counter through all of it, not eating, not drinking, not sitting. When the sun came up over the Chester, red and low, he turned to me. “Mom, I do not want anything,” he said. “I want you to know I do not want anything.” I said I knew it. That was the first time in three years I believed him.
I did not give him the farm, because there was no farm to give. But I gave him a job. I told Tyrell to start him as a deckhand at eighteen dollars an hour, on the Lorrie B, on the five a.m. run, in January. Derek took the gloves without a word. He learned to cull, to count, to tell a spat from a seed. He came to the dock in the dark and stayed until the last bag was in. Ashley moved back to her mother in Salisbury, and sent me a letter I read once and put in the cedar chest.
In March I took Derek out to the first acre at low tide, in our old skiff, with a new set of cages. We stood in the shallows in waders, and I handed him a bag of seed oysters. They were small as a thumbnail, and cold. Together we set the first cage on the same square of bottom where Frank and I had set ours forty seven years before. When it was down, Derek straightened up and looked at his hands. They were cracked and raw. “Mom, are these supposed to hurt?” he asked. I told him that was how you knew they were yours.
That night I took the Denny coupon book out of my purse, where it had been since the crab house. I crossed out every printed offer with a marker. On the cover I wrote, in block letters, “GOOD FOR ONE YEAR OF SUNDAY BREAKFASTS, MY HOUSE, LOVE POINT ROAD.” I put it in his hand on the dock. He read it twice. Then he sat down on the leaning boards beside me with his boots hanging over the water, and he did not say one thing, and neither did I, and the tide came in under us, slow and sure.