NASHVILLE, GEORGIA – JUNE 1985
SARAH KYLE WAS in her late thirties, but could have passed for fifty. She was waiting tables in the diner where she had worked since she was a teenager. A stranger, a man whom Sarah judged to be in his early sixties, was sitting in a booth next to the plate glass window that overlooked the street. He wore an expensive suit and silk tie. Carefully cut gray hair covered his head and his fingernails looked as if he had a manicurist on permanent retainer. He had finished his breakfast and was dawdling over coffee.
It was nearing nine o’clock and the place had emptied out. The people who lived in this rural part of Georgia were early risers who ate their breakfast and went to work. There was no time for lingering. The owner stood behind the cash register at the end of the counter, reading the morning newspaper. Sarah took a fresh pot of coffee to the man in the booth. “Refill?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you. You’re Sarah Kyle, aren’t you?” His voice was tinged with the distinct accent, recognizable to most Georgians as that of a person who’d lived his whole life in Atlanta.
Sarah was surprised, but nodded. “I used to be.”
“Can you sit and talk for a few minutes?”
“I’m on the clock,” she said, a bit wary now.
“I know. But I wanted to meet with you and I didn’t know any other way to go about it.”
“I don’t understand. Why would you want to meet with me?”
“Are you still singing?”
She laughed. “God, no. Who are you?”
“My name’s John Peters. I own a string of auto dealerships in Atlanta.”
“And what brings you all the way down to Berrien County, Mr. Peters?”
“I came to see you.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. Why did you come all the way down here to see me?”
“To apologize.”
“For what?”
“Ask your boss if you can take a fifteen-minute break to talk to me. I think it’ll be worth your while.”
“How so?”
“I was a judge in the Miss Georgia pageant years ago. The one you should have won.”
That hit her like a jolt of electricity. She stepped back and stood stock still, staring at the man. “I don’t understand,” she finally said.
“Come talk to me.”
Intrigued by the man and his mission, Sarah asked her boss if he’d mind if she sat with the guest for a few minutes. He didn’t.
“Tell me what this is all about,” Sarah said as she slid into the booth across from the stranger.
“I’ve lived a good life,” he said. “I’ve built a large and lucrative business and I did it by hard work and honest dealings. I’ve raised my children to be men and women of integrity and I’m very proud of the way they’ve turned out. I was recently diagnosed with a rare and untreatable lung disease. It’s terminal and I need to make right the only unethical thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“As I said, I was one of the five judges at the Miss Georgia Pageant. I was responsible for your not winning that year.”
“I’m confused,” Sarah said.
“I put out the word to the other judges that you were pregnant and we couldn’t have a pregnant Miss Georgia.”
Sarah was stunned. “That’s absurd. I was still a virgin when I went up to Macon that year.”
“Well, obviously, I didn’t know about that, but it wouldn’t have mattered. You were headed for the win, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
Sarah was confused. It had never crossed her mind that the pageant could have been fixed. She knew, of course, that she’d won the talent event, but she’d always assumed that she just didn’t do well enough in the other areas to even make the final five.
Her mind was churning. She’d accepted her loss and was thankful for the opportunity to compete. She knew there was life after the pageant, and even if she’d gone on to the Miss America contest, the time for her to enjoy the fame was fleeting. As it was, she had left Macon disappointed that she would not be able to go to college, but still happy enough with her life. She came back to the diner and met a young man that had been four years ahead of her in high school and, after a year of dating, she married him.
It was a good marriage and in quick succession produced two boys, who were now in their teens. Her husband worked on a ground maintenance crew at the nearby Moody Air Force Base. His work was steady even if it didn’t pay well. Her income from the diner supplemented his salary to the extent that they could live in a small house with a big mortgage, but there was little left over for luxuries.
Sarah had often wondered how her life could have been different if she’d been able to go to college, if she’d won the pageant and gotten the scholarship money, but it wasn’t in her nature to dwell on disappointments or thoughts of what might have been. She was reasonably happy with her lot in life, loved her two boys, and liked her husband well enough.
Sarah came out of her reverie. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Why would you do something like that?”
“I was having an affair with Polly Norris,” he said, “and she and I cooked up a way for her to win.”
“You were having an affair with Polly? She must have been half your age.”
“I don’t think you’d call it an affair, really. We were having sex during the pageant. It started a week before when I met her at a cocktail party put on by the organization that sponsored the Miss Atlanta Northside contest. She came on to me, and God forgive me, I responded.”
“How did you pull it off?” Sarah asked.
“The affair?”
“I don’t care about the affair. I mean how did you fix the pageant?”
“You did very well in the interviews on Monday. I thought you were the best and gave you a high score. So did the other judges. But, when I saw you sing in the event on Tuesday night, I knew nobody could compete with that. Polly’s twirling certainly wouldn’t come close. You were beautiful and I thought you’d do well in both the evening dress and swimsuit competition. I had to undo some of the interview scoring and make sure that you didn’t win anything else. I couldn’t touch the talent scores. You were that good.”
“How did you fix that?”
“Easy enough. I told the other judges that I’d heard from a medical source in your hometown that you were pregnant. I’d known the rest of the judges for a long time and they trusted my word. Three of them have died, and I’ve fessed up to the one survivor. He agreed with me that I should talk to you.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Peters,” Sarah said, her anger rising. “It’s too late to change anything, so I’m not sure why you came all the way down here to tell me this. Maybe it makes you feel better, but it just makes me think about what might have been, the opportunities I might have had, if you hadn’t been so morally corrupt. Was your affair worth it?”
“The affair, if you can call it that, ended when the pageant ended. I think the last night was a kind of thank-you from Polly. The next morning, she told me that we were finished.”
“What’d you do?”
“I went home to my wife and children.”
“Did you tell your wife what you’d done?”
“No. It would have broken her heart.”
“Did it occur to you that telling me this would break my heart?” The anger was subsiding now and morphing into a sad acceptance that even decent people sometimes do bad things to good people and walk away from the disasters they leave in the lives of those they have wronged. “Knowing that I didn’t win has never been a big deal to me. I just got on with my life. Now, knowing that I should have won and my life would probably have been very different, I have to live with the fact that I got screwed out of a better life. Literally.”
“I’ve thought about that. I’ve learned a lot about you, your family, and your life since the pageant. I may have robbed you of your best chance for a better life.”
“Are you going to tell your wife now that you seem to need to make apologies to people you’ve wronged?”
“My wife died last year. She never knew.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but what do you want from me? Forgiveness?”
“No. I think that’d be too much to ask of you.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. If I’d won that pageant, I’d probably never have married the man I did, and I wouldn’t have the two boys I love better than life itself. We have to work hard and scrimp to get by, but we live and work among friends. I’ve known most of them for my entire life. It’s not a bad life when you think about it. So, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll forgive you. I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive Polly. I thought she was my friend.”
“I’d like to give you some money. Enough to make your life easier.”
Sarah shook her head. “That’s not necessary, Mr. Peters. I won’t take your money. Certainly not just to assuage your guilt. Maybe that’s your punishment. To end your life knowing you couldn’t fully make amends. Thank you for coming.” She stood, left the booth, and walked into the kitchen.
John Peters paid his check for breakfast and left the diner. He did not leave a tip.
Six months later, Bill Perry, the man who had paid for Sarah’s extras at the pageant, came into the diner at midmorning. He stopped at the front and spoke quietly to the owner behind the counter. He walked over to Sarah and said, “Your boss said we could talk for a minute. Can you get us some coffee and sit with me?”
Sarah came back with two cups of coffee. “What’s up?” she asked.
“I know you met with John Peters a few months back.”
Sarah was surprised. She’d never told anyone about that meeting. She didn’t want to hear a lot of commiseration. What was done was done and she couldn’t change anything, even if she’d wanted to. “How did you hear that?” she asked.
“John came to see me right after he talked to you. He hired me to represent him as his lawyer and told me what he’d told you. He said it was privileged information and he was depending on the attorney-client privilege to keep me from ever speaking of it to another soul. Ever. He made one exception. He told me he wanted me to talk to you after he died.”
“Yes. His son just called me. John left written instructions to notify me upon his death.”
“There’s a part of me, that bitter part I try to keep tamped down, that wants to be happy he’s dead, but I’m doing my best not to think like that. Did he tell you what happened at the Miss Georgia contest?”
“He did. It was despicable. Nobody can ever make that right for you.”
“I’m okay, Bill. I was shocked when he first told me about the situation, but I’m not that disappointed about it. My life would have been different, but it might not have been as good. Knowing that if I’d won I probably wouldn’t have my two boys makes me glad I didn’t win. Those boys are my life. It all worked out. Still, that little kernel of bitterness doesn’t go away. I just try not to dwell on what might have been.”
“John told me he’d offered you money to help make up for what he did. You refused to take it.”
“Yeah. It wouldn’t have changed a thing, and I thought the only reason he offered me the money was to make himself feel better.” She chuckled. “I guess I didn’t want to let him off. He ought to feel guilty.”
“He was a very rich man, Sarah, but he told me he would not insult you further by leaving you anything when he died.”
“Good for him.”
“However, he did say that he didn’t think it would insult you if he left your children something.”
“Crap. What did he do?”
“He had me set up a trust for each of your boys. Enough to pay for a college education for each of them to include room, board, tuition, books, and a generous stipend for spending money. It’s enough to send them to the finest schools in the country.”
Sarah was stunned. She sat back in her chair. “He was a smart bastard, wasn’t he? He knew I couldn’t turn down something like that for my boys. He knew we’d never be able to afford to send them to college. I can’t turn him down, can I?”
“I don’t see how, Sarah. It was very generous. I think he was genuinely remorseful about what he did to you. Take the money and give your boys the chances to do what you couldn’t because of his chicanery.”
“You know what, Bill? In the end, it’s probably a fair trade. Who knows where that other road, the one that would have stretched before me if I’d won, might have taken me?”
“We’ll never know, Sarah. Take care of those boys.”