Sherry unfolded the first page of the contract on top of the torn corner of the quitclaim deed and read it silently, her lips pressed together. I saw the exact moment she reached the number. Her mouth came open a little, and she looked up at me over the top of the page, and then back down. “Six million, two hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “For the recipe. For the dog biscuits.” She turned to her husband in the chair beside her, slowly, as if turning a ship. “Wayne. Your mother just sold her coffee can for six point two million dollars. And you were going to charge her six hundred dollars a month for a twin bed.”
Wayne did not look at her. He was staring at the screen of my phone, which still lay on the table beside the envelope, as though the voice inside it might begin again. “Mama,” he said, “that was a joke. I was talking to Gary. We say crazy things.” I said, “You said it was your truck payment, son. Twenty six payments of nine hundred dollars, from a young mother with a baby. You said I paid rent out of dog biscuits.” The dryer in the next room buzzed again, and this time Sherry got up and walked out of the kitchen, and I heard her stand in the laundry room for a long time without folding anything.
When she came back, her eyes were red and her mouth was hard. She laid a stack of papers on the table, and I saw that she had pulled them out of the folder of Wayne, from under the deed. “These are bank statements,” she said. “I found them in the glove box last month and I was afraid to ask. There is an account at a bank in Tupelo that I never heard of. It has twenty three thousand, four hundred dollars in deposits.” She was not looking at me. “And a loan for the truck. And a second loan I do not know the name of.” “Lorene, I did not know. I swear to you on my children.”
A pet food contract was unfolded over the torn corner of a deed and gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the kitchen table.
I believed her. A woman cannot fake the color that came into that face. I reached across the table and put my hand over hers, the same hand that had stirred peanut butter into oats for thirty years. “Honey,” I said, “I know you did not.” Wayne made a sound. He is a big man, with a gut and the jaw of his father, and he looked at the two of us holding hands across his legal pad and understood, finally, that he was alone at his own table.
I told them what I wanted, and I was surprised at how calm it sounded. The twenty three thousand, four hundred dollars would come back to me within the week, plus the rent I had paid for the room off the carport. The tenant on Gloster Street would pay me directly from now on, and I would write her a letter and sign her a lease, and thank her for being kind to a stranger. The quitclaim deed would be burned in the barbecue pit. And I would not be sleeping in that room another night. A cab would be coming at four, I said, and it was already paid for.
Wayne found his voice. He asked where I was going. He said, “Mama, you cannot live alone. You are seventy six years old.” I looked at him a long time. “Wayne, I raised you, I buried your daddy, I baked a dog biscuit worth six million dollars in a coffee can, and I have managed my own money for fifty years. I can stand to live alone.” I took the phone and put it in my purse. “I am not going to the sheriff. I want you to know that. I have thought about it all week, and I am not. Because the man I would be putting in that jail is the little boy I used to rock to sleep.”
He put his head in his hands. Sherry did not touch him. She sat very straight with her hands in her lap, and when he finally lifted his face, she said in a voice as flat as a plate, “Wayne, I am taking the girls to my sister in Corinth tonight. I will be back when you have fixed this. All of it.” She was not leaving him. She was giving him a deadline. He nodded. He stood up and went to the window and looked at the carport, and the little room off the side of it, and the twin bed through the open door.
The cab came at four. I put one suitcase in the trunk and a coffee can of oats on my lap, and Sherry stood on the porch holding the hand of her youngest girl, who waved at me with her whole arm. I rolled the window down and waved back. We went first to Gloster Street. The young mother was waiting on the porch with the baby on her hip and a plate of banana bread under foil, and she told me she had hardly slept for worry. We sat in my own front room, on her sofa, in my own house, and drank her coffee, and she cried and I cried and the baby laughed at both of us.
I bought a brick house on Jefferson Street ten days later, with a kitchen window over the sink and a screened porch that catches the evening breeze. I paid cash. In the kitchen I hung the coffee can, empty and dented, on a nail by the stove, and next to it a framed picture of Ernest in his Navy whites. By the end of the month, the money from Wayne had come back, in two cashier checks, with a short note in his awful handwriting that said, I am ashamed. I put the note in the can.
On Sundays, Wayne comes to the house now. Sherry and the girls came back in March. He sits at my kitchen table and measures oats, and I teach him, one scoop at a time, how the biscuits are made, all but the secret ingredient, which I will take to the grave. We are going to open a little shop together on Main Street, Porch Biscuits by Miss Lorene, with the old bird dog Buck on the sign. And on the first of every month, with a grin, he hands me an envelope with nothing in it but a dollar bill and a dog biscuit. Rent, he says. I put the dollar in the can.