I slid my thumbnail under the flap of the white envelope and drew out the papers slowly, so that everyone at the picnic table could see. “This is the closing statement for Pine Harbor Candle Company,” I said. “Three million nine hundred thousand dollars. The company was sold in June, and I told no one, because I wanted to know whether my daughter loved her mother or only what her mother had.” The father of Josh studied the first page, then the second, and took off his reading glasses. A gull cried over the Penobscot, and the bell buoy rang its slow note out on the water.
Erin recovered her voice quickly, the way people do when they have practiced. “Mom, I can explain the card. I only used it for emergencies.” “A spa at the Colony Hotel, a handbag in Boston and a kayak, Erin?” I said. “Sixteen thousand four hundred dollars, on a credit card that I never applied for, opened in my name, with my home address on it. And every payment was taken from my checking account.” I laid the second page of the statement flat on the table. “The bank has given me a sworn affidavit of fraud. I have not signed it. That is what is in this envelope as well.”
Josh looked at the kayak charge, and then at his wife. “Erin, you told me your mother bought me this, for my birthday. You said she loved the idea.” “She would have,” Erin whispered. The mother of Josh set down her napkin and pressed her fingers to her lips. His father leaned forward, wiped his hands slowly, and said in a low voice, “Young lady, I have owned a hardware store in Portland for forty years, and I have never once taken something and called it a gift.” The wind came up off the river and lifted the corner of the tablecloth, and nobody reached to smooth it down.
A bayberry candle poured in nineteen seventy seven gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the table in Bangor.
I kept my voice level, as I had at the craft shows when a customer complained about a price. “Here are my terms. You will close that credit card tomorrow morning, at the bank, with me beside you. You will repay every dollar in monthly payments, from your own pay. You will stop collecting my mail, and I will have a new post office box by Friday. And you will tell Josh and his parents the whole truth, tonight, once, without excuses.” Erin nodded, and her eyes filled. I held up the unsigned affidavit. “If you do all of that, I will tear this in half. If you do not, I will sign it and send it.”
On Monday I drove to the workshop in Brewer, and a surprise was waiting. The new owners had kept every employee, and the forty women and men who poured candles stood in the parking lot in their aprons. They had heard what happened from a cousin of a cousin, the way news travels in Maine. A pourer named Dottie, who had worked for me for twenty nine years, took my hand. “Adele,” she said, “you never missed a payroll, not even the winter the boiler broke. We would have helped you carry the whole company on our backs.” The room smelled of bayberry and balsam, and I was home.
The money consequences were not small. Erin repaid the credit card through a hard payment plan, and she took a second job at a dental office on weekends. She sold the kayak and the handbag, and she took a loss on both. The parents of Josh, who had offered to help the couple with a down payment on a house in Portland, quietly withdrew the offer until they could see a full year of honesty. Josh took charge of the household accounts, and he put them in a ledger. For the first time in her life, Erin could tell you exactly where every dollar went.
I wanted something bright to come out of the dark. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of my husband. The Walt Bouchard Fund pays for the winter heating bills of elderly neighbors in Penobscot County who cannot afford to stay warm. Every December, I deliver a candle with each check, a bayberry one, poured by hand. Last year we helped one hundred and twelve households. A woman in Orrington met me at her door with tears in her eyes. “Miss Adele,” she said, “I have not had a lit candle since my husband passed.”
Josh came to see me alone, with a loaf of bread from his mother. He stood on the step and said he wanted to apologize for the toast and for the laughter at the clambake. I told him that no one was laughing at him. He sat at my kitchen table, drank a cup of coffee, and told me how frightened he had been when he understood what had happened. I said that fear is a good teacher and a poor master. We talked about the town, and the weather, and the pie of his mother, and somewhere in the middle we both began to laugh.
Erin took the longest. For two months she paid on time and said almost nothing. Then one evening she came to the workshop and asked if she could learn to pour a candle. I stood beside her at the stove with a pot of melted wax and showed her how to set the wick, how to pour slowly, and how to wait. Her first candle was crooked, and the wick was too short, and it guttered when she lit it. She looked at it for a long moment, then looked at me. “Mom,” she said, “I think I finally understand what you made.”
On the first night of the Common Ground Fair, I set my table in the shade of the big maple, with a row of bayberry candles in tin holders and a hand lettered sign. Erin stood beside me, selling candles in an apron, her cheeks pink. A little boy asked what bayberry smelled like, and she lifted the lid and let him sniff. He shut his eyes and smiled. “It smells like Maine,” he said. I took the little bayberry candle from my pocket, the first one I ever poured, wrapped in tissue paper since 1977, and I lit it. The flame stood straight and steady.