I sat in the bank back room with Mr. Novak, and I read the betting slip over and over until the numbers stopped being numbers. A sports book in Milwaukee. A wager of forty six thousand dollars on a basketball game, placed on the twenty second of March, four days after my husband died. And the winnings, if there had been any, had gone nowhere I could see. My son had opened the safe deposit box of his father at ten fourteen in the morning, taken out the brown envelope that Walt had kept for twenty six years, and bet it all on a game. And he had lost.
I remembered what Walt told me when his brother died in 1998. “Lorraine, if Kevin ever goes into this box, you call the old partner of my brother. Only him.” I did not know the name of the partner. I went through the address book of my husband in the kitchen that night with a magnifying glass, and on the last page, in pencil, I found one entry with no first name, only a phone number and the single word Gus. I dialed. A deep, rusty voice answered on the sixth ring. “Lorraine Becker,” it said. “I have been waiting a year for this telephone call.”
Gustav Lindqvist was ninety years old, a retired attorney, and he lived in a tidy bungalow in Plymouth with a parrot named Archie. He received me at his dining room table in a wool vest, and he spread out the papers with hands as spotted as river stones. “Your brother in law, Henry, left a trust,” he said. “One hundred and eighty thousand dollars from the sale of his boat yard. He asked me to hold the originals. And Walt, who administered it, asked me to keep it safe from your son. He said the boy had a weakness, and he was too ashamed to say it to you.”
The signature of a good woman can be copied but never counterfeited, for it carries a whole life in the hook.
The envelope in the box had held a certified check for the full one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Kevin, with the forged letter of authorization, had walked into the bank and walked out with it, and cashed it at another branch the same morning. Some of it had gone to Chad. Some of it had gone to the sports book. And a good part of it, Gus said, had gone to a man in Milwaukee named Terry Kolb, to whom my son owed a great deal more. “Lorraine,” he said very gently, “your son is not a bad man. He is a sick one. But he stole from you, and he forged your name, and I think you know what comes next.”
I did something that morning I had never done in my life. I put on my good wool coat and my pearls, and I drove to the Sheboygan County courthouse, where I had typed every word for thirty one years, and I walked up to the desk of the district attorney and asked to see him. He was a young man named Pruitt, and when I put the forged bill of sale in front of him, he went quite still. “Mrs. Becker,” he said, “I remember your testimony. You were the best court reporter we ever had. Are you certain you want to do this?” I said, “No. But I am certain it must be done.”
They brought Kevin in for questioning on a Thursday. I sat in the next room, behind the glass, with a cup of cold tea, and I watched my son sit at a metal table in his work shirt and tell them the truth. It took four hours. He wept. He did not argue. He said he had borrowed from the box a little at a time since January, convinced he would win it all back, and that after his father died he panicked. When the detective asked him why he had forged the bill of sale for the car, he said, “Because it was the last thing I could sell.”
The thing that undid me was his hands. Kevin has the hands of his father, broad and careful, and they trembled on the table like leaves. I thought of Walt, kneeling under the convertible with a wrench for twenty two years, humming the polka he loved. I stood up and opened the door of the interview room, and my son looked up and saw me, and his face fell apart. “Ma,” he said. “Ma, I am so sorry.” I crossed the floor and put my arms around his neck, and I held him, a grown man of forty eight, the way I held him at three.
The court did not show him mercy, but it showed him sense. Kevin pleaded guilty to theft and forgery, and the judge, a woman who had known me for decades, gave him a sentence of probation with eighteen months in a treatment program for gambling, and ordered him to repay every cent from his wages. He is two years into it now. He works in a tire shop in Sheboygan Falls and lives in a rented room over a bakery. On the first of every month he comes to my house with an envelope, and I deposit it in the trust, where Walt would have wanted it.
Chad paid back the money he had been given. The young man in the hoodie turned out to be his cousin, and was fined for trespass. The convertible never left the garage. On the Fourth of July the following summer, I put on a blue dress and a straw hat, and Kevin, six months sober, drove the red 1966 convertible down Eighth Street in the parade, with the top down, while I sat in the passenger seat and waved to the crowd the way I had waved for fifty years. The people along the curb applauded the car. They did not know. I did not need them to.
That night, when the fireworks were over, I sat alone on the porch with the old marriage license in my lap, the one with the signature from before the fishhook. I signed a fresh page at the kitchen table, slowly, with my whole name, and let the L curl into its little hook. It looked like a fishhook. It looked, I thought, like something that had caught what it was after. “You caught me, Walt,” I said to the warm dark. “And I am so very glad.”