Bernice read every word.
She read them sitting on the wheelhouse floor of her father's boat, with the flashlight propped on the captain's chair and the bayou slapping softly at the hull. It took her an hour. When she was done, she sat for a long time in the dark with her hand over her mouth.
Then she put everything back in the tackle box, closed the lid, and carried it up the dock to the house.
She called them both at seven in the morning.
"Come to the house," she said. "Both of you. Before the condo man."
Carol Ann started to argue. Bernice cut her off.
"I found Daddy's box," she said.
There was a long silence on the line. Then Carol Ann said, "I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Faye did not argue at all. She only said, very quietly, "All right, Bee," which was what she had called her when they were girls, and which she had not called her in twenty years.
They sat at their mother's kitchen table, the three of them, with the green tackle box in the middle.
Bernice opened it. She took out the bank envelope first.
"Daddy took the money out himself," she said. "Thirty-one thousand, four hundred dollars. In four trips, between November and February. These are the withdrawal slips. Mama found them in his truck after he died. She hid them in his box."
"Who drove him?" Carol Ann said. "That's the question, Bernice. Who drove him to the bank?"
"Mama did," Bernice said. "Every time."
Carol Ann stared at her.
Faye closed her eyes.
Bernice unfolded their mother's letter on the table and read it aloud. She did not trust herself to explain it.
In the winter of 2005, Russell Thibault had lost his boat.
Not sunk. Taken. He had borrowed against it after a bad season, and then another bad season had come, and then the bank had called the note. Russell was a proud man, a third-generation shrimper. He had not told a soul. Not his father-in-law. Not his wife.
Faye had found out only when the repo notice came in the mail in November. She had gone to her mother, crying, in the kitchen of this house.
And their mother had gone to their father.
Emile Ladnier had not hesitated, the letter said. He was already sick. He knew it. He said the money was for the girls, and Faye was one of the girls. He and Lorena drove to the bank four times that winter, because Emile insisted on cash and the little bank only kept so much on hand, and Lorena paid off Russell's note in person, in cash, at the bank in Bayou La Batre.
Then Russell came to see Emile.
He stood on this same dock and begged him. Please. Don't tell anybody. Not the other girls. Not the town. I'll pay it back. Every penny. Just let me keep my name.
And Emile, who was a proud man too, gave him his word.
Bernice's voice gave out. She handed the letter to Carol Ann, who read the last part.
Then Emile died in April, and you girls came home, and the money was gone, and you all looked at each other. And I watched you do it. And I said nothing.
I told myself I was keeping your daddy's promise. That was true. But I was also afraid. If I told you, Bernice would have been angry at Russell. Carol Ann would have told someone. And Faye would have lost her husband's respect in her own house.
So I let you blame each other. I thought it would pass in a year. It did not pass. Every Christmas I set four places, and every Christmas it was just me. That was my punishment, and I earned it.
Russell paid back every penny. It took him eleven years. Here are the deposit slips. I put every dollar in an account in your three names. It is still there.
Russell is gone now. Emile is gone. I am going. There is not one person left to protect. Forgive each other. Forgive me if you can.
Mama.
Carol Ann put the letter down.
For a long time, the kitchen was silent. Outside, a pelican came down low over the bayou and settled on a piling at the end of the dock.
Then Faye said, so softly they almost did not hear her, "I knew."
Her sisters looked at her.
"Not all of it. Not that Mama let you think it was me, or you, or Carol Ann. But I knew Daddy paid Russell's note. Russell told me the night before Daddy's funeral." Faye's hands were shaking. "And he begged me too. Not to say. And I didn't. I sat at that funeral lunch and watched you two tear each other apart, and I didn't say one word."
She looked up at Bernice. Her eyes were full.
"You sent me a card," she said, "when Russell died. I read it every night for a month. I didn't answer because I didn't know how to start."
Bernice got up from her chair, walked around the kitchen table, and put her arms around her sister.
She did not say anything. She did not have to. After a moment, Carol Ann got up too, and came around the other side, and put her arms around both of them. They stood there in their mother's kitchen, the three Ladnier girls, holding on, while the coffee went cold.
The condo man came at ten. Bernice met him at the door.
"I'm sorry for your trouble," she said. "We're not selling."
He was surprised, and then gracious about it. He left his card. Carol Ann put it in the drawer with the dish towels.
The account their mother had kept in their three names held thirty-one thousand, four hundred dollars and eleven years of interest. They used part of it to have the Miss Lorena hauled out, scraped, and painted. They leased her to Faye's grandson, Jacob Thibault, who was twenty-three and had wanted to shrimp since he was six.
On Christmas Day, Bernice set the table in their mother's kitchen.
She set it for four, the way Lorena always had. Three plates for the sisters. One plate at the end, in their mother's place, with her blue stationery folded on top of it.
Carol Ann looked at the fourth plate a long time. Then she sat down beside it, and reached over, and straightened the fork.
"There," she said. "Now we're all home."