Part 3 — The Showroom
Darlene did not raise her voice. She said it plainly into the VFW microphone, and a hundred and forty people heard every syllable.
“Seven months of Tuesdays and Thursdays, he drove two hours each way. And he never once walked into the cancer center. He walked into a boat showroom in Madison.”
A sound went around the hall like wind going through a cornfield.
Darlene opened her purse and took out a folded paper. “I did not guess, Joanne. A girl I volunteer with works part time at the showroom on Aberg Avenue. She recognized the photo on the fundraiser page.”
Skip stood up so fast that his chair skidded. “Larry, tell me she is lying.”
My husband said nothing. He picked up his knit cap and held it in both hands.
“There is no cancer,” I said, and my voice did not shake. “Is there, Larry?”
He shook his head.
For seven months I had held his hand in the kitchen and laid his socks on the radiator, and the only thing that had been sick was his word.
The sheriffs deputy who had been standing quietly by the door stepped up. He asked Larry to come outside, and Larry went without a fight. In the parking lot he sat on the curb, a gray-haired man with a perfectly healthy liver.
The district attorney in Marathon County told me the next day that obtaining money by false pretenses over ten thousand dollars is a felony in Wisconsin. But he also said that restitution weighs heavily in what a judge does next, and that donors could be made whole through the fundraising platform.
The platform froze the account that same afternoon. Skip, who was mortified, helped the church ladies write to each donor, and refunds went out to everyone. The raffle lady who had given three hundred dollars out of her Social Security got hers first, with a handwritten card.
The showroom refunded Larrys boat deposit and the outboard motor. I got back my Buick, and Larry sold his truck to cover what remained of the twenty-four thousand, three hundred dollars.
He pleaded to a lesser count, completed a program for gambling and lying that the judge ordered, and moved into his brothers basement in Merrill.
I did not take him back, and I did not hate him either. I changed the locks and kept the house.
That winter morning I put one pair of socks on the radiator out of habit, and then I laughed, and put them on my own feet.