Tasha opened the envelope slowly, and drew out the contract, and I watched her eyes go down the first page and stop. She read the number twice. She put her finger under it like a child learning to read. “Nine million, one hundred thousand dollars,” she whispered. “For a salve. For the salve from the beauty shop.” She looked up. Her mouth was open. “Mama Inez, I have that stuff in my medicine cabinet. I put it on the baby heels. I did not know it came from you.” I said, “I know, baby. There is much you did not know.”
Marcus pushed back his chair. He is a big man, with the bearing of a deacon and a voice made for prayer, and I watched that voice go small. “Mama, we will celebrate this,” he said. “This is wonderful news. We can put it all in a family trust. I will talk to somebody at the bank.” I put my hand on the envelope. “No, son,” I said. “You will not talk to anybody at the bank. The money is mine, and it will stay mine. What we are going to talk about is account number two six one four, and the sixty thousand dollars of your father that went into it.”
Tasha slowly set the contract down. I had seen that look on a woman once before, on my own sister, the day she found a second set of keys in the pocket of her husband. It is the look of someone doing arithmetic with a broken heart. “The boat,” she said. “You told me it was your overtime. I asked you three times.” Marcus said, “Tasha, please. Not in front of Mama.” She laughed, one dry note. “Where else would you like me to say it? In church? You are a deacon of the church, Marcus. You led the prayer on Sunday over the casserole.”
A tin of grandmother salve and a long white envelope were set on a kitchen table and gave one widow the evening to bring her deacon son to the pulpit.
Marcus tried then, one more time. He lowered his voice, the way they do when they think they are being reasonable. “Mama, the union money, I did not take it for me. I took it to protect it. The bank was calling on the house. The boat was a good investment, I would have sold it. I was going to pay you back.” He reached for my hand across the table. “You are my mother. You would not put your own son out on the street.” I took my hand away. “I will not put you on the street,” I said. “I will put you on the witness stand, if I have to. But I would rather not.”
The room was quiet. A refrigerator hummed. Down the hall, the little one was singing to a doll in a thin, sweet voice, and the sound of it was almost unbearable. I looked at my son, who had the hands of his father, big and square, and I thought of the day I took him to the Teamsters picnic in 1983, on the shoulders of Otis, with a sno cone in each fist. I thought, what happened to that boy? And I knew the answer, and I did not like it. Nothing happened. He had simply grown up believing he was owed.
So I told them. Sixty thousand dollars, plus the interest, by the end of the year. The bass boat would be sold at the lake on Saturday, and I would take the check to the credit union myself. Marcus would stand up at Mount Zion on Sunday, and he would tell the congregation what he had done, in his own words, with his own mouth, and he would resign as a deacon. “And I will tell you why,” I said. “Not to shame you. A man cannot lead a prayer with a lie on his tongue. The Lord can hear a tongue like that.”
Tasha stood. She was a small, sturdy woman, with her hair in a wrap, and she had not touched her plate. She went to the door of the room where the little ones slept and looked in. Then she came back, and she put her arms around my neck from behind, the way she did on the day I first moved in, when she cried because she said the house felt like home with me in it. “Mama Inez,” she said, “I will stay with him. But he is going to earn it.” She looked across the table at her husband, and I saw something in her face that was neither love nor anger. It was weather.
On Sunday, Marcus stood at the front of Mount Zion, in the blue suit he wears for funerals. The pews were full. He held the microphone with both hands. He told them about the union benefit, and the boat, and the lie, and the fish fry. He did not leave anything out. When he sat down, nobody said amen. For a long time, there was only the sound of the fans. Then my pastor, an old man with a cane, said, “Brother Marcus, that took more courage than most of us have in a lifetime.” And one by one, the mothers of the church began to hum.
The salve went on the shelves in March. Little round tins with a drawing of a cast iron pot on the lid, and under it, in the handwriting of my grandmother, three names: Mama Pearl, Mama Lula, and Inez. I stood in the drugstore on Slappey Boulevard and looked at the display for twenty minutes, and a young woman asked if I needed help, and I said, no, baby, I just wanted to look. She took a tin and smelled it and closed her eyes. “It smells like the kitchen of my grandmother,” she said. I told her mine too.
I bought a little house on Peach Street with a porch and a pecan tree, and I cook the salve in my own kitchen, in the pot, for my own church, free, the way my grandmother did. Marcus mows my lawn on Saturdays. He does not say much, and neither do I. Last week he left the first payment of his debt on my kitchen table, in an envelope, a tidy stack of twenties, with a tin of salve on top. He had put a note under the tin. It said, For the cracks in your heels, Mama. And the cracks in everything else.