Marcus did not argue with me. He stood up behind window three, took the folder of my granddaughter between two careful fingers, and pressed the button under his counter that calls the manager. Destiny laughed, a high, brittle laugh, and said I was confused and that everyone in the line could see it. The six people behind me did not laugh. A shrimper in white rubber boots took off his cap. I am Lorraine Batiste, eighty years old, and I stood at that counter with my cane in one hand and my deposit slip for nine million seven hundred thousand dollars lying face down under the other.
The manager, a calm man named Alvin Rudd with silver at his temples, came out of his glass office carrying a thin blue file. He did not look at Destiny. He looked at the stamp on her papers and then at me, and he said, “Mrs. Batiste, we have seen this notary before.” He opened the file on the counter. The notary was a man named Dwight Fenner, from Pascagoula, Mississippi. His commission had been pulled in August, after the sheriff there found a drawer of stamped blank forms and a list of elderly names from three Gulf Coast banks.
Destiny stopped laughing. She looked at the door, and then at the file, and then at me. Her pink nails stopped tapping. Somewhere in the lobby a printer ran a page and went quiet. “Grandma,” she said, and her voice dropped to the small voice she had at six years old, “I can explain. Tre said it was only paperwork. He said you would never need that money, and that nobody would be hurt.” Mr. Rudd closed the file very gently, as if it were a Bible, and asked the guard by the door to come stand near us.
A deposit slip turned face down on a credit union counter gave one seafood widow the length of a bank line to bring her granddaughter back to the truth in Mobile.
I gave my terms there at the counter, in a voice no louder than at Bible study. “Destiny, I am not calling the sheriff today. Hear me. You will go home with me and pack, and tomorrow morning you will check into the treatment house in Fairhope that Mr. Rudd will help me find. Tre will not set foot in my house again. Every dollar you have taken from my accounts, you will repay by working, and I will keep the ledger. And on the day you have ninety days clean, I will sit beside you in the front row and clap.”
My granddaughter gripped the edge of the counter, and the tears finally came, black with mascara. “Grandma, it started with pills after my car accident,” she said. “Then Tre brought home something stronger, and I told myself it was only until I got my feet under me. He said you were sitting on a fortune and would never notice a little. I wrote your name on that power of attorney in the car, with his friend Dwight standing there with the stamp.” She wiped her face with her wrist. “I was never going to leave you with nothing. I swear it.”
But shame is a fast runner. Destiny snatched the folder and the cashier check order off the counter, spun around, and ran for the glass doors with her heels clattering across the tile. She got twenty feet. Officer Pete Gandy, the guard, a heavy man with a gray mustache, stepped into the doorway and spread his arms. The shrimper in the white boots moved in from the left. And the whole line, six people and a woman with a stroller, closed ranks across the lobby like a net, while Marcus came out from behind his window and called her name.
Destiny stopped with her back against the cold glass, the folder crushed to her chest, and the afternoon light from Government Street pouring in around her. The shrimper spoke first, in a slow Gulf drawl. “Baby girl, I knew your granddaddy forty years. He sold me my first bushel on credit. Do not do this to his wife.” Destiny looked at the faces in the line, and then at me, leaning on my cane at window three. She walked back across the lobby, laid the folder in my hands, and went down on her knees on the tile.
The consequences came in the weeks that followed, one patient step at a time. Destiny went to the house in Fairhope, and I drove across the bay every Sunday with a pan of gumbo. Tre left Mobile within the week, and his friend Dwight Fenner was arrested in Pascagoula for the stack of forms the sheriff had already found. I deposited my slip at window three the next morning, and Marcus stamped it with a grin so wide that the whole lobby clapped. The nine million seven hundred thousand dollars went safely into the vault.
In the name of my husband Clarence, who passed in 2021, I started the Clarence Batiste Fund. It pays for boat repairs for family shrimpers after the storms and for college scholarships for the children of seafood workers, in Mobile, Baldwin and Washington counties. In the first year we repaired thirty one boats and sent nineteen students to school. One was an eighteen year old from Bayou La Batre who had never left Alabama, and who stood on the dock at five in the morning with her acceptance letter in her hand, laughing and crying at once.
On a cool morning in March, I stood on the dock at Bayou La Batre with a thermos of chicory coffee, watching the shrimp boats come in under a pink sky. Destiny was on the deck of the nearest one in rubber boots and a ball cap, sorting the catch with the old crew, one hundred and four days clean. She looked up and found me on the pier. Then she lifted a big, shining shrimp high in her fist and shouted across the water, “Grandma, Granddaddy would say this one is a keeper!” I lifted my cane in answer.