The next morning I got up at four, drove to the shop, and took down the old framed paper Buddy hung over the cash drawer in 1978, the one everybody thought was just his lucky first dollar, and behind the dollar, folded flat against the cardboard backing, was the thing that saved Chesapeake Bait and Tackle.
It was not just a dollar bill. Tucked behind it was a recorded deed. When Buddy opened the shop in 1978, he did not lease that spot on the dock. He bought it, the little parcel the shop and porch sit on, recorded at the county, a fee-simple square of land inside the marina that has been ours for forty-five years.
Everyone including the new owners assumed my husband was a tenant they could refuse to renew, but Buddy quietly bought the ground under his shop in 1978 and hid the deed behind his first dollar, so that no marina company could ever put his widow off the porch he built.
The young man in the polo read me a letter about my lease not being renewed. But you cannot fail to renew a lease that never existed. Buddy owned the land. The yacht-club company from Annapolis had bought the marina around a parcel they did not own, and they never checked the plat closely enough to notice the little square in the middle that says Buddys name.
My lawyer loved it. He said in forty years he had never seen a bait shop that owned its own dirt inside somebody elses marina, and that the new owners restaurant plans would have to go around me, because I was not going anywhere.
When the young man came back on the thirtieth of September to see me cleared out, I was on the porch with my coffee. I handed him the recorded deed and I said, tell your ownership in Annapolis that my husband bought this ground in 1978. The shop is not a tenant. Its an owner. This porch is not coming down in October or ever, and the watermen will still be getting their coffee here at five in the morning long after your yacht club figures out it built itself around me.
He took a picture of the deed with a shaking hand and drove off, and the lawyers confirmed every word. They ended up having to design their fancy docks around Buddys little shop, which sits there now like a splinter they cannot pull.
A bait shop doesnt fit the brand, the boy had said. My husbands bait shop owns the only piece of that dock nobody can take, because Buddy was a waterman, and watermen know that the man who owns the bottom owns everything above it. He hid the proof behind his first dollar, and his widow opens at five, same as always.