The signature on the pawn receipt was Leonards.
My brother. The man who had just carved the turkey and told me to hand over the coins.
He sat down because he had been waiting nine months for somebody to find that receipt, and he had never once imagined it would be a police officer in my dining room on Thanksgiving.
The officer did not say anything. He let Leonard talk, and Leonard did, with his hands flat on the tablecloth.
In March, two weeks after we buried Ulysses, the funeral home had called me about the balance. I did not have it. The insurance had not paid yet and the Post Office pension had not started and I was sitting at my kitchen table with a bill for eleven thousand dollars and a checkbook that could not cover it. Leonard had been there. He had seen my face.
He had asked me, that afternoon, if he could take the green box to the appraiser on Ingersoll to update the insurance photos, because Yvonne had been asking for them. I said yes. I handed it to him myself.
He took the 1893 gold piece out, pawned it for thirty-four hundred dollars, and paid the funeral home the next morning in my name. Then he put the box back in my closet and the pawn ticket in his wallet, and he had been paying the interest on it every month since, waiting until he had the money to redeem it, so he could put the coin back before I noticed it was gone.
He never got there. He is seventy-four and he lives on a railroad pension.
I had not noticed. I had not opened the green box since Ulysses died.
Craig had called the police to prove I was a thief, and the only person in my house who had taken anything had done it to bury my husband.
The officer asked Leonard whether the ticket was still good. Leonard pulled it out of his wallet. The redemption period had been extended twice because he kept paying. The coin was still there.
Then the officer turned to Craig and told him that there was no stolen property in this house, that the collection was mine by the insurance companys own records, and that filing a false report of a theft was itself a matter he could pursue if I wished to. He asked me if I wished to.
I looked at Craig. I looked at his wife, who had not met my eyes all evening. I said no. I said he had lost his father in February and had not known what to do with it, and that I did not need a judge to tell him what he had just learned in front of fourteen people.
Craig left without his plate. His wife stayed long enough to hug me at the door, and she said, very quietly, that she was sorry, and that she had told him not to call.
Leonard and I went to the pawn shop the next morning. I redeemed the gold piece myself, with money from the insurance check that had come in June. Leonard tried to stop me. I told him he had carried it long enough.
The coin is back in the green box. I took the box to Yvonne the following week and had every piece photographed again, and she added a line to the rider that says the collection passes to Craig when I go. That was my decision. Ulysses would have wanted his son to have them, eventually. He just would not have wanted him to call the police to get them.
I mailed Craig one coin in December. His fathers first wheat penny, 1943, the steel one. I put it in a card with no note. He has not written back. But Thanksgiving is at my house, it has always been at my house, and there will be a chair at the far end.