Max Devore tries to buy off Mattie and Kyra

Max Devore tries to buy off Mattie and Kyra by turning a family relationship into a series of increasingly extravagant cash offers. Recalled by Mattie, the episode begins after she and Lance decide to marry and culminates in a covert proposal that would have kept her away from both Lance and Kyra until the child’s twenty-first birthday. Its decisive revelation is not simply the scale of the money, but the method: Max seeks to purchase Mattie’s disappearance, Kyra’s separation from her mother, and the silence that would conceal his role in the arrangement.

Background and First Offers

The first two offers came in August 1994, after Lance called his father to tell him that he and Mattie would marry in mid-September. Max made them directly to Mattie by telephone, each time when Lance was absent. The first was $100,000; a week later, the amount doubled to $200,000. Mattie understood the condition as a demand that she leave Lance and go away without leaving a forwarding address.

She initially kept the offers to herself. When the second offer arrived, she told Lance, who reacted angrily and called his father. Lance insisted that the marriage would go ahead and warned Max that he would have to behave if he wanted a relationship with his future grandchild. His response set a boundary on Mattie’s behalf, but it did not stop Max from trying a different route.

The Attempt to Buy Kyra

About ten days before the wedding, Max’s associate Dickie Osgood visited Mattie and directed her to call a number in Delaware. The proposal conveyed through that call was an attempt to buy Kyra: Mattie would give birth, leave the child with Lance, and disappear from both their lives. The proposed payment was $2 million, deposited in a bank of Mattie’s choice west of the Mississippi, in exchange for an agreement to stay away from Kyra and Lance until at least April 20, 2016, when Kyra would turn twenty-one.

The offer extended well beyond a single payment. Max also promised an additional $1 million on each of Kyra’s fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth birthdays. Mattie’s recollection gives the arrangement a grimly practical shape: the money was presented as a route out of an unstable trailer home, even as its price was the loss of her family. Her rueful comparison of her deteriorating home—the kitchen linoleum bubbling, the showerhead falling into the tub, and the whole structure leaning east—with the fortune she could have received underscores the material temptation without suggesting that she accepted it.

Secrecy and Significance

Mattie says Osgood did not know the details, leaving Max’s own involvement concealed and his reputation in town insulated. That separation between the intermediary and the man behind the offer is part of the scheme: Max could pursue the separation he wanted while avoiding a visible connection to the proposal. The earlier telephone offers had likewise been made when Lance was not present.

Taken together, the successive proposals show a change in scale but not in purpose. Max first tried to remove Mattie from Lance’s life; after the marriage was imminent, the offer targeted her relationship with Kyra as well. The money’s precise terms—an immediate payment, four later installments, a bank west of the Mississippi, and a deadline tied to Kyra’s twenty-first birthday—make the attempted separation look like a transaction with enforceable conditions. In Mattie’s account, however, its central demand remains personal and absolute: to abandon her husband and daughter and stay away.