The woman in the sundress at table six walked to the front of the pavilion with a little boy who had Rays chin, and she said, I think it is time everybody met Ray Junior. And across the grass came my daughter Megan, holding a manila folder against her chest.
I did Rays company books for the first fifteen years, before he could afford an accountant, before he could afford Megan. So when Megan called me the night security walked her out with a cardboard box and said, Mom, I found something, and I think that is why, I knew exactly how to read what she had found.
Megan was the office manager for eleven years. She knew where every dollar went. And she had found that a good many of them were going somewhere Ray did not want anyone to see, to a second household, to the woman at table six and the boy with his chin, paid for out of company accounts he thought no one was watching. He fired his own daughter the day she got close to it. And Megan, being my daughter, made copies before security reached her desk.
He stood on a picnic table and told three hundred people the secret was family values. He had two families and was stealing from the company to hide one of them.
The folder had it all, the diverted funds, the accounts, the paper trail a bookkeeper mother and an office-manager daughter can build in their sleep. Three hundred employees heard the woman name the child, and watched Megan hand me the folder, and did their own arithmetic.
Ray built thirty-two years of Ray Haskins Construction on money and he lost the shine off all of it in one afternoon over banana pudding. The diverted funds became a matter for auditors and lawyers, not for a picnic.
Megan did not want her job back. She did not need it. With what was in that folder she had her pick of firms, and her name cleared in front of everyone who watched her carried out in a box.
I filed that week, after fifteen years of his books and a lifetime of his tone, with a protective order for the elbow he marched me out on. I made three hundred deviled eggs for that picnic. It was the last thing I ever cooked for Ray Haskins.