The man on my porch was Special Agent Grant Hollis of the Missouri Gaming Commission, in the suit and tie he wore to church, and he rang the bell a second time before Kevin could reach the door. I knew Grant. He lived four streets over, and his wife sang alto beside me in the choir. My lawyer in Springfield had reached him at his Easter table at 1:25, and he had finished his ham and driven over. He came into my kitchen, took off his hat, nodded to me, and then turned a long, polite look on Rick, who was still holding the broken handle of his coffee cup.
Grant told the room what the Commission had known for eleven months. Rick had been building a plan to place unlicensed slot machines in leased theater lounges across Branson, with the sale of the Yancey Showboat Theater as the first step. The agreement Kevin signed was not only void, it was evidence of a conspiracy. Rick had advanced the markers of Kevin, nearly four hundred thousand dollars, to make my son dependent on him. The paper from the desk, the note in the handwriting of Amber, and the two point three million dollars that had moved through an account of Rick that morning all went into the folder of the agent.
Amber had followed her father into the kitchen. She listened with one hand pressed to her chest. When Grant mentioned the note, she made a small sound like a child who has been caught. “Mrs. Yancey,” she whispered, “I wrote it. I did not know what he was really doing. I thought it was a business deal. Daddy told me you were old and tired and that it would be a kindness. I wanted so much for him to be proud of me that I did not ask a single question.” Her mascara had run down both cheeks. In the dining room, her mother sat frozen over the deviled eggs.
A phone call from a kitchen stool gave one widow the hour to bring her son back to the table in Branson.
I gave my terms from the stool, with my plate still on my knee. “Kevin, you will resign as general manager today, and you will give Grant everything you know about the dealings of Rick. You will work stage crew at the Showboat for a year, at the wage of any new hand, and you will go to the meetings in Springfield every Thursday. Amber, you will tell the truth to the Commission, and then you will come back to this kitchen, and we will start over. Rick, you may finish your coffee, and then Grant will walk you to the car.”
Kevin set down the knife he was still holding and sat on the kitchen floor, which I had never seen a grown man of fifty do. “Mom,” he said, “I let her father put you in the kitchen. I saw it. I saw it, and I carved the ham. I was so deep in debt that I could not look up, because if I looked up I would have to see what I had done.” He put his hands over his face. “Dad built that theater with a bad knee and a borrowed spotlight. I almost sold it for a lounge with slot machines.”
Rick, meanwhile, had been edging toward the hall, and now he seized the sale agreement from the counter, crumpled it in his fist, and bolted for the back door. He pulled it open and found Marvin on the other side, blocking the doorway with a toolbox in one hand and the locksmith at his elbow. Marvin is six feet four. He said, in his slow, courteous way, “Mr. Rick, I changed that lock myself. It does not open for you.” Rick turned, found Grant Hollis smiling at him from three feet away, and slowly uncurled his hand.
When the agent had led Rick to his car, with Amber walking behind in her good Easter dress and her stocking feet, she stopped on the porch and turned back. I stood in the kitchen doorway and she looked at me. I did not say anything, because I had said enough. I only opened my arms. She came in at a run and pressed her face into my shoulder. I held that sobbing young woman who had sent me to the kitchen, and I thought of the deviled eggs of my mother, and I understood that forgiving is sometimes just a matter of being the one who is still standing.
The money consequences were tidy. The sale was void, the accounts were unfrozen, and the Commission froze the assets of Rick in Illinois. His casino was sold to pay the penalties, and he took a plea. Kevin kept his freedom by cooperating, and he repaid the markers from his own wages over four years. The three theaters, a hundred and ten jobs, and the dream of Leon stayed in our hands, every light still burning on the Strip that Sunday night. The company that wanted the Showboat for two point three million dollars never called again.
In the name of Leon, who passed in 2022, I started the Leon Yancey Fund. It pays for music lessons, instruments and tickets to the Showboat for children in Taney, Stone and Christian counties. In the first year we put a violin, a guitar or a trumpet in the hands of ninety eight children. A boy of eleven from Forsyth, who had never owned a toy, learned three hymns on a secondhand banjo and played them for me on the stage. I cried in the second row, and Marvin handed me his handkerchief without a word.
The next Easter I cooked again, honey glazed ham and all, for the same family. This time I carried the first plate to the head of the table myself, to the chair of Leon, and I sat down in it. Kevin carved. Amber, thin and quiet, passed the potatoes. Nobody said a word about the year before. After the blessing, Amber leaned across the table and asked, in a small voice, if she might sit beside me for the coconut cake. I moved my plate over and patted the cushion. The sunrise service of that morning still glowed in the windows.