Chapter 3

She read the inspection report at her kitchen table Friday night with the overhead light on and a glass of tea going warm beside her elbow.

Page one was narrative. Facility: Kimbro's Kitchen, 14 Courthouse Square. Date of inspection: 05/16. Time of inspection: 12:05 p.m. Observed: walk-in cooler, interior, ambient air 58°F. Thermometer mounted on left jamb. Door gasket warped, torn at lower corner. Temperature log not produced upon request. Prior violation on file: 06/09/2023. Repeat offense.

Page two was a grid of checkboxes, all of them marked in the same blue pen.

Inez read it three times. Then she got up, walked to the walk-in, and stood in front of it with the door shut.

The thermometer hung on the right jamb. It had hung on the right jamb since April of '23, the week Calvin's cousin put in the new door, the week she paid $1,340 for a gasket and a new hinge and a strip curtain because the county said the old one wouldn't pass.

Left jamb. Warped gasket. Torn at the lower corner.

That cooler didn't exist anymore. It hadn't existed for two years.

"Bay," she said.

Bay came in from the dining room with a notebook. "What."

"Read this part."

Bay read it standing up. When she got to the gasket, her face changed - the way it did when she caught a teacher in a mistake and had to decide whether to raise her hand.

"He never opened the door," Bay said.

"He never opened the door."

"Then how'd he see inside it?"

Inez sat back down. "He didn't."

"So he lied."

"He wrote it from memory." She said it slowly, because saying it made it real. "He wrote it from the last time he was in my kitchen. Two years ago. He sat at that counter and ate a bowl of soup and wrote down everything he saw, and then he went home and used it again."

Bay sat down across from her. "Mamaw, that's - that's actually good. That's proof."

"It's a piece of paper he signed and I can't prove a thing about."

"Then we take the picture."

"The picture's on his wall."

They sat with that a while. Out on the square the streetlights came on, one bank of them at a time, and the courthouse clock ran through six.

Saturday morning Inez was standing outside the health department at eight-thirty with the report in her purse and the appeal stamped in her hand. The door was locked. The sign in the glass said OPEN MONDAY 8:00 A.M.

She called the number on the placard. It rang four times and went to a recording that told her the office was closed and that emergencies should be directed to the state line.

At noon she walked over to the diner and stood in her own dining room with the chairs up on the tables. Then she went home and got her address book and started calling people.

Otis Priddy said he'd sign anything she put in front of him. Lurlene Baker said the same, and cried again on the phone. The two linemen from the co-op said no, ma'am, they couldn't - they had licenses and a contract, and they weren't going to put their names on county paper.

By four o'clock she had two statements, both handwritten, both signed, both worthless and she knew it.

She drove to the annex anyway.

Delia Fannin was working the Saturday desk in a gray cardigan, a stack of agendas at her elbow. Delia had eaten at Kimbro's since she was nine years old and paid her tab down every second Friday. She took the statements, read them, and set them in a folder she did not close.

"Your appeal's item fourteen," she said. "After the health department's annual review."

"Fourteen."

"There's twelve items ahead of it and one of them's a budget amendment." Delia glanced at the door, then back. "Mr. Tillery called the chairman this morning. Twice."

Inez nodded slowly.

"Inez." Delia's voice dropped. "He's telling people you're a repeat offender."