Part 3 — The Second Policy
The wife of Craig opened her mouth, and for a long moment the only sound on that patio was the hiss of the fire pit. Her name is Lindsey. She is thirty-eight, she sells real estate, and I had never once seen her without an answer ready. She had none now. Craig held the yellow note out to her as if it were hot.
“Say it, Lindsey,” he said. “Why did you call him?” She looked at me. I think she was deciding, one last time, whether a lie would still work. Then she lifted her chin, which is what she does when she has decided that honesty is cheaper. “I called because I wanted to know how much there was,” she said. “And how fast it could be moved.”
The man who sold the policy to Walt in 1991 is named Mr. Dunmore, and he sat in my kitchen two weeks after the funeral and told me all of it. At eight in the morning, the day after we buried my husband, Lindsey phoned his office. She asked if there was a second policy. She asked what the process would be to have a surviving spouse sign over a benefit. And she asked, in so many words, whether a woman of seventy who had just lost her husband could be considered confused.
Mr. Dunmore did what a decent man does. He wrote down the date and the time, he refused to say another word, and he called me the same afternoon. Walt had told him, years earlier, to keep an eye out. Walt knew his children better than they knew themselves, and he knew which questions would come first.
Stacy turned to her brother. “Did you know she called?” Craig was silent for so long that I knew the answer. “She said it was just to ask,” he said finally. “I did not ask what.” I believe him. That is the saddest thing I can say about my son: he did not ask what.
I took the third envelope out of my purse. It was the smallest. I handed it to my daughter, because I wanted her to be the one. Inside was a copy of the second policy, and a letter from Mr. Dunmore on the letterhead of his agency. The policy was for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The owner and the beneficiary were the same person: Delia. Me.
“Your father bought it in 2008,” I said, “after the plant cut his hours and he fixed furnaces for half the pay. He paid the premium out of his own wallet for sixteen years. Not one dollar of it came from either of you. He told me that if you were kind to me, I would know what to do with it. And if you were not, I would know that too.”
The second policy pays me, and it paid me in August. I put the money in a plain account at the same credit union where I have banked for fifty years, and I did not tell a soul. The call of Lindsey, with its date and its time, is in a file in the cabinet of Mr. Dunmore. He told her so by letter. He also told her, politely, that an attempt to coax a widow into signing away her benefit is the kind of matter that agencies of the state like to hear about.
Lindsey cried then, not prettily. She said that she and Craig had two children and a mortgage and that she had panicked. I said I understood being afraid of money. I said I did not understand being afraid of a widow. She apologized, and I let her finish, and I told her I would think about it. That is all I said. A person has to be allowed to carry a thing a little while before she decides what to do with it.
What a parent leaves behind is not the money in an account, but the question of who deserves to be trusted with it.
Craig stayed after the others left. He put out the fire pit with a bucket and then he sat on the edge of the picnic table with his head in his hands. I sat beside him. He said he was sorry about the card with twenty dollars, about the steakhouse, about all of it. I told him that I had never needed the money to be a lesson. I had needed my son.
On the first of October I did two things. I wrote a modest check to a college fund for each of my grandchildren, with their names on the envelopes and a note in my own hand. And I booked a trip to Maine, with my sister, for the last week of the leaves. We stood at a rail above the gray sea, and she asked what I wanted to do with the rest.
“Be kind to people while they are still here,” I said. “And buy myself a good coat.” We laughed so hard that a seagull took off from the rail. At home, on the mantel, behind the clock, the card of Mr. Dunmore is still where I put it. On the back, under the line Walt asked him to write, I have added one of my own: He was right.