“Gordon,” he said, “forging a signature on a loan document is a federal crime. I sit on a bank board. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear this.”
My father looked around the hall for someone to defend him.
Forty people looked back.
No one said a word.
Mr. Kessler slid one more envelope across the table to me.
“There’s one more thing in the box,” he said. “Check under the felt.”
I lifted the green felt at the bottom of the recipe box.
Underneath was a folded contract, yellow with age.
A licensing agreement from 1987, between June Bell and Lancaster Country Bakery. For the rights to sell “Grandma June’s Shoofly Pie” in their stores.
Royalties: paid every quarter. For life. And then to her heir.
I had seen that pie in every grocery store in Pennsylvania my whole life.
I never knew it was hers.
“She never told your father,” Mr. Kessler said. “She said, ‘Gordon would have spent it by Tuesday.’ She told me it would go to whoever kept her recipes alive.”
