“…Mrs. Odessa Pruitt, from the Wednesday prayer circle,” I told Shanice, and I tapped the first name in my church directory with one finger, because it was the first name on the list the bank had linked to GCHP Services. Odessa was ninety one years old. She lived on a fixed income in a house on Pass Road, and she had been paying three hundred and ten dollars a month for pills she had never swallowed. I dialed her number from my kitchen telephone with a hand that trembled. She answered on the fourth ring, and I said, “Odessa, honey, this is Lorraine, and I need you to sit down.”
I read her the names from Shanice list, one at a time, over three days. Mr. Lenoir, who lived on my street. The Broussard sisters. A young man who had once been in my Sunday school class. There were thirty eight of us in all, mostly widows, mostly old, and every one of us had been told the same thing by a kind, patient voice on the telephone: your heart medication is ready, we will bill your account on the first. Nobody had thought to ask for a receipt. We were people who trusted our children, our neighbors, our pastors, and the kind young people who set up our bills.
On the fourth day, my great niece Shanice drove me to the Gulfport police station in her little blue car. I wore my Sunday hat. I carried a shoebox of statements tied with a ribbon, one from each of the thirty eight people. A detective named Mr. Landry, a soft spoken Black man in his fifties with a gold tooth and a cardigan, took us into a small room with a table and a box of tissues. He read through the box for forty minutes. Then he looked up and said, “Mrs. Batiste, I have been waiting for someone to bring me this.”
A pharmacy that does not exist, thirty eight monthly autopay accounts, and a shoebox of statements tied with a ribbon.
He told us that the state attorney general had received three complaints about GCHP Services in the last year, all dismissed because the victims were too embarrassed to follow up. Now, with thirty eight statements, a registered agent, and a recording of Tyler voice on the line, the case was solid. He asked me, carefully, whether I wanted the family informed before the arrest. I said that I wanted to speak to Kimberly myself. He said that was unusual. I said that I was eighty two and had cooked for four thousand people at the Biloxi buffet, and I had never been afraid of a kitchen.
I went to Kimberly house that evening, with Andre. My son had come when he heard, a tall quiet man of fifty, a welder, who stood in my driveway holding his cap in both hands. He said he had known nothing. He said it three times. I believed him. We walked up the steps together to the pink stucco house on Beach Boulevard, and Kimberly opened the door in a satin robe, with her hair in a wrap. She looked at me, then at Andre, then at the detective car parked quietly across the street, and she sat down on the bottom stair.
She did not deny it. She said, in a monotone, that the pharmacy had started as a small idea, a way to use her certification, to run a legitimate side business selling supplements. The first customers were her patients at the nursing home. It had become easier to bill them than to deliver. She said she had told herself it was the same as a subscription. Nobody was hurt. “They did not even notice,” she said. I said, “Kimberly, Odessa Pruitt noticed. She skipped her own birthday dinner in October because she could not afford the cake.”
Kimberly went very still. She put her hand over her mouth, and her whole body folded forward. Tyler came down the hall, a tall boy of twenty four in a gray sweatshirt, and stood behind her, silent. I looked at him. I said, “Tyler, you called me Miss Lorraine.” He nodded. He said he had known it was wrong the first time, and he had wanted to quit, and he had been afraid of his mother. I told him that he would help the detective, and that I would be there when he did.
It took fourteen months. The bank, once shown the evidence, refunded every victim in full, plus the fees. The state seized the account. Kimberly pleaded guilty to wire fraud and received three years, to be served in Jackson, with a restitution order that would follow her out. Tyler testified, received probation, and took a job at a boatyard in Biloxi. Andre moved out of the pink house and into my spare room, for a time, and slept on the narrow bed where he had slept as a boy.
In November, the prayer circle held a belated birthday party for Odessa, who had gone without a cake in October. We gathered in the fellowship hall, thirty eight of us and the pastor, and Detective Landry came in his cardigan with a bakery box under his arm. Inside was a white coconut cake with ninety two candles, so many that the frosting began to melt before we finished singing. Odessa wept and laughed together. She said it was the first time in her life that anyone had thrown a party for her. We cut the cake into thirty nine pieces, and no one went hungry.
On the second Sunday of every month now, I cook for the whole prayer circle in the church basement. I make a pot of red beans, a pan of cornbread, a pecan pie, a chicken and sausage gumbo thick enough to hold a spoon upright. All thirty eight of us come, in our good hats, with our canes and our folding chairs, and we eat together, and we laugh, and we talk about the weather. Odessa sits at my right hand. At the end of the meal she always taps her glass with a spoon and says, “To Lorraine, who read the statements.”