“That is the old Army jacket of Dad,” Rick said, his voice shaking. “He gave it to Tyler when Tyler turned eighteen.” The detective froze the picture. The man at the pantry shelf had his back half turned to the lens, but the green canvas coat with the torn pocket and the strip of tape reading MERCER was as familiar to my husband as his own hands. In the doorway, Wayne had stopped talking. A moment before, he had been red with indignation. Now his face was the color of old paper, and he put one hand against the frame.
“That is not Tyler,” Wayne said. “That is not my boy.” But the detective zoomed in, and the face turned slightly into the pantry light, and there was no mistaking the jaw, the small scar beside the eyebrow, the dark curly hair of a young man of twenty four who had always been the favorite grandson. Rick sat down on a kitchen chair. “Wayne,” he said, “you told the detective Bonnie was the only one who touched the food. You knew. You knew who else had been in this house.”
The envelope in the video was traced by the detective within two days. It had contained a rat poison, the slow kind, which builds in the blood a little at a time and looks like old age. Tyler had visited four times in the fall, each time on a Sunday while we were at church, each time with a key that Wayne had copied from the one under the flowerpot. Wayne was three months behind on the mortgage of his restaurant. Harold had refused to lend him another dollar. He had believed the house of his father would be his if I were convicted.
A cook who feeds a household with love will always be defended by the plain truth of the pantry shelf.
Tyler was picked up that evening at his apartment in Bossier City, still wearing the Army jacket. He cried before the detective had finished reading his rights. He said his father had told him that Harold was going to die soon anyway, that it was only a matter of speeding up nature, and that I would take the blame. He said he had been sick to his stomach after the first time. But he had gone back three more times. His father had told him that a Mercer does what is needed.
Wayne tried to leave the house. He got as far as the porch before the second officer stepped in front of him. He turned around and looked at Harold, who had been brought home from the hospital that morning against the wishes of the doctors and was sitting in the recliner with an oxygen tube, thin as a rake. “Pop,” Wayne said, in the voice of a boy, “you know I did not mean it.” Harold looked at him for a long time. “I know exactly what you meant,” he said. “That is the trouble with it.”
Wayne and Tyler were each sentenced to prison, Wayne for fifteen years and Tyler for six, since he cooperated. At the sentencing, Tyler turned in his chair and mouthed the words I am sorry across the courtroom to his grandfather. Harold, who was by then strong enough to sit upright in a suit, nodded to him gravely, once. He told me in the car afterward that a young man can be led by his father to do a thing he would never have thought of alone. “He will have a long time to think about it,” Harold said. “So will Wayne.”
It took Harold three months to regain his appetite. I cooked everything from scratch, as I always had, but now we tasted each dish together first, and he insisted that I eat from his plate too. “A man who has been given poison,” he said, “has a right to be foolish about his supper.” By Christmas he had gained eleven pounds. He walked to the mailbox without his cane. He told me, with great satisfaction, that his cardiologist had called him “a medical curiosity.”
One evening in January he asked me to sit with him in the den, where the old clock ticked on the mantel. He took my hand in his large dry one. “Bonnie,” he said, “I did change my will in August. Rick did not know. I did not want the family arguing over it. You have fed me and nursed me and put up with my temper for six years, and not once did you ask for anything.” His eyes filled. “I should have thanked you long ago. I am thanking you now. The house is yours. It was always going to be yours.”
I protested, of course. I said it belonged to Rick, to the family. Harold waved a hand. “Rick has a good job and a good wife,” he said. “Rick will be fine. I want you to have the house, and I want it in writing, and I want you to do one thing with it.” “What is that?” “Open the dining room to the neighbors on Sundays,” he said. “Cook for anyone who is lonely. There are more of them than you think.”
We began the following month. At first six people came to the table. Now the number is closer to thirty. Harold sits at the head with his napkin tucked into his collar, telling the same stories about the oil rigs in the Gulf and the winter of the great freeze to anyone who will listen. Rick carves the roast. I stir the pot. And when a newcomer asks, nervously, whether the food has been salted, the old man winks across the table and says in a loud voice, “Young lady, I have never trusted anyone in my life but the cook.”