Frank Dolan, the retired Baltimore policeman who had raised the daughter that married my son, kept one finger on the white envelope and waited. I am Earl Pettibone, seventy nine years old, and I sat by the trash cans of my son backyard in Perry Hall with a paper plate of cold crab on my knee and the ring of my wife June glittering on the tablecloth. Nobody in that tent was moving. A child at the end of the table stopped sucking on a crab claw, and the grill let out a long hiss that sounded like a sigh. The DJ had turned the music down to a murmur. I nodded once, and Frank slit the flap with his thumbnail and drew out three pages.
The first page was the sale agreement for Pettibone Seafood, six million, eight hundred thousand dollars, signed seven weeks earlier in an office in Annapolis. A gasp ran around the tables. Dennis had spent a year telling his wife family that his father was a worn out waterman living on Social Security. The second page was a bank report. Someone with a power of attorney that I had never signed had taken forty one thousand dollars from my account since the spring, in small checks, and the bank had traced every one to the casino at Arundel Mills.
The third page was a letter in the round, careful hand of June, written in her last winter. Frank read it aloud because my voice would not work. “Earl, if Dennis ever sells this ring, give him a chance to put it right, and then give it to the girl who finishes college. I love him. I do not trust him. Both things are true. Please be both kinds of father.” Tiffany covered her mouth. Kristen was crying. The seagull on the fence lifted off, and the whole yard watched it go.
A white envelope slit open at a crab feast gave one old waterman the afternoon to bring his son home to the family in Dundalk.
I gave my terms from the folding chair, as gently as I have ever said anything. “Dennis, you will return the forty one thousand dollars, a little each month, and you will sit down tomorrow with a counselor from the casino program in Glen Burnie. Tiffany, the ring goes back on the tablecloth, and you will have your twenty five hundred dollars back from me by Friday. I will not call the police. Your mother asked me to be both kinds of father, and today I intend to be the second kind first.”
Dennis put his hands over his face. “Pop, I owed twenty thousand to people who do not send letters,” he said, and his voice broke in the middle. “Every time I lost, I told myself I would put it back before you noticed. I sold her ring because I could not stand to look at it. It looked like Mom was watching.” I told him that she was. Kristen sat down in the grass in her party dress and held on to his knee, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then his courage failed him altogether. Dennis lunged across the table, snatched the white envelope out of the hands of Frank, and ran for the side gate with the pages crumpling in his fist. He got as far as the steaming pots. Two brothers of Kristen, big men in Orioles caps who had been tending the Old Bay and the bushels, stepped into his path with a basket of hot crabs held between them like a battering ram. Dennis stopped so fast that he sat down in the wet grass, and the basket tipped, and forty crabs went scuttling toward the fence.
The brothers hauled him to his feet with great politeness, and brushed the Old Bay off his shirt, and one of them even handed him a napkin, because in the families of the Chesapeake you do not humiliate a man you have just caught. One of them returned the envelope to Frank. The other began chasing crabs. For a moment the whole backyard was laughing and gasping at once, and even Dennis, red faced and sitting in a puddle of melted ice, let out a broken sort of laugh. Then Mia, the graduate, the first Pettibone to finish college, crossed the lawn in her cap and gown and put her arms around his neck. “Dad,” she said, “you can stop running. Grandpa already found you.”
The consequences were handled quietly. The ring went onto the hand of Mia that evening, in front of everyone, and she wore it into the house to show her mother. Dennis entered the program in Glen Burnie, and he has repaid nineteen thousand dollars in eight months. The six million, eight hundred thousand dollars from the plants I placed in a trust for the grandchildren, with a bank in Towson as trustee, so that neither Dennis nor I can be tempted again. Tiffany mailed her check back to me with a note saying that she was ashamed.
In the name of my wife June, who passed in 2023, I started the June Pettibone Fund. It pays for scholarships for first generation college students and for gambling counseling for the families of watermen, in Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Harford counties. In the first year we sent twenty six students to school and placed thirty one people in counseling. One was a crab picker from Essex who had lost her house to the slot machines and now keeps a ledger of her own.
On a Saturday in October, Dennis and I stood at the steamer behind the old picking house on the Patapsco, which I have kept as a museum, and he cracked crabs with the same hands that once stole from me. Mia picked the meat. The wind carried the smell of Old Bay across the water, and the gulls wheeled over the dock where June and I once tied up our first boat. When she held up the first clean lump of backfin, Dennis reached over, took it, and put it on my plate. “For Pop,” he said. “Right near the table, where he can see the whole yard.”