…and we took our seats down front, eleven old women in our good pearls, and folded our hands, and waited.
The Chamber president stood up with the trophy and started reading the man’s citation. He got about two sentences in before a woman from the state licensing board — the one my granddaughter had spent three weeks handing that binder to — walked up the side aisle and passed him a folded paper.
He stopped reading. His face changed. And into that microphone, in front of the photographers and the head table, he announced that the award was being withdrawn, because as of nine o’clock that morning the honoree’s contractor’s license had been suspended, pending an investigation into eleven counts of financial exploitation of the elderly.
Eleven. One for each of us in the pearls.
My granddaughter had shown the board what we couldn’t say alone — eleven identical contracts, eleven torn-off roofs, eleven stalled jobs, one after another, a pattern as plain as a quilt. We’d also filed claims against the surety bond every licensed contractor has to carry. My $9,400 came back. All eleven deposits came back. And a deacon’s roofing crew from Gulfport had every last one of our roofs finished and sound before hurricane season came around again.
The man put his boots up on his desk for a confused old gal, and never once did the arithmetic on eleven of them with a granddaughter at the licensing board.
Oh — and I did teach his father in Sunday school. When that good man heard what his boy had done, he made him drive to each of our houses and apologize on the porch, hat in hand.
Eleven “confused old gals” in their church pearls, one binder, and one patient granddaughter at the right desk turned out to be the very last thing a man who preys on widows ever wants to see walk through the ballroom door.