“She already knows what the second card was used for,” Earl had written, “and she has been waiting for someone to ask.” I read the last line twice and then looked up through the kitchen window. Gus was sitting on my porch steps with his cap on his knee, his back to the door, giving me the privacy of a good neighbor. I opened the screen and said, “Gus, would you drive me to the bank in the morning? I do not think I can do this alone.” He did not even turn around. “I will pick you up at nine,” he said.
The bank manager, Sheila Okonkwo, met us at the door of her office before we had given our names. She was a tall woman in a navy suit, and she looked at the envelope in my hand and exhaled slowly. “Mrs. Pettit, your husband came in twice last fall,” she said. “I have been keeping a folder since then. Please sit down.” On her desk, spread in neat rows, were eleven months of statements on the second card. The charges were cash advances, wire transfers, and a jeweler in Columbus. The total was forty one thousand dollars.
“Who signed for the card?” I asked. Sheila turned a page toward me. The application bore my name in handwriting that was almost mine, and beneath it, in the small box for the mailing address, was the old apartment of Mark on Brown Street. “The card was opened by telephone last February,” she said. “The call came from a phone registered to Jessica Pettit.” Gus, who had been sitting very straight in the corner, let out a low whistle. I thought of the soft blue dress that Jessica had worn to the funeral of Earl, and the tissue she had pressed to her eyes.
A good husband tucks the truth into the place his wife will one day sit down to grieve.
The man in the gray jacket, Sheila explained, was the brother of Jessica, Cody Lang. He collected the cash advances at a branch across town, and a camera at that branch had recorded him four times. Earl had seen all of it in the fall. That was why the photograph existed. My husband, who had never raised his voice to anyone, had followed his own daughter in law into a parking lot and taken a picture with the camera of our grandson, so that I would never be told I had imagined it.
I did not sleep that night. I sat in the dark kitchen and thought about the year. Jessica had come into my home in April with two suitcases and a bright voice. She had washed my dishes and sorted my pills, and she had moved the photographs on the mantel, one by one, until Earl was no longer in the middle. She had asked me gently whether I remembered where the checkbook was. All of it had been a quiet search, and I had thought it was kindness. In the morning I called my son and asked him to come home from work.
Mark arrived at noon, and Jessica came in behind him with a bag of groceries and a bright smile. I set the folder on the table, and Sheila, who had agreed to come to my house, sat beside me with a pen. I did not shout. I said, “I have found a card in my name that I did not open.” The smile of Jessica held for a moment too long. Then Mark picked up the photograph, looked at his wife in the parking lot, and said in a voice I had never heard from him, “Jess. Who is that man?”
She tried to talk. She said it was a misunderstanding, a program for seniors, a favor for her brother. Mark listened to each explanation with his eyes on the table. When she said that I had probably forgotten signing, he stood up. “My mother,” he said, “has not forgotten a single thing in seventy three years. Dad took that picture. Dad followed you.” He took his keys off the hook by the door and set them in front of her. “You can sit in my car while I call the police, or you can stand outside it. But you are leaving this house today.”
Jessica was charged with identity theft and credit card fraud, and her brother with theft by deception. She accepted a plea and a sentence of probation with full restitution. The bank, after the review of Sheila, forgave the portion of the debt that had been taken in my name. Mark came to me the following Sunday and knelt at my chair, the way he had when he was small. “Mom, I stood in that hallway and let her carry out the recliner of Dad,” he said. “I told myself it was only furniture.” I answered that grief makes a person stupid for a while, and that I knew it well.
At six that evening, Gus appeared on my doorstep with his old truck backed up to the curb. “I never took it to the dump,” he said, looking a little sheepish. “I kept it in my garage. I thought you might want it back.” He and Mark carried the corduroy chair up the front steps and into the living room, and they set it in its old place facing the television. It smelled of cedar and dust and Earl. I sat down in it for the first time since January and let the worn corduroy close around me like a hug.
I stayed there for an hour, with my feet up and my eyes closed, and nobody said a word. Mark made soup in the kitchen. Gus fell asleep on the couch with his mouth open. And in the pocket of the chair, behind the zipper, I found one more small thing that the family had missed: the old reading glasses of Earl, folded, with a paper clip around one hinge and a tiny strip of paper stuck to the lens. In his careful print it said, “You did it, Lorraine. I knew you would.”
That winter we hung the picture of Earl back in the middle of the mantel, and Mark moved into the spare room to help me, which this time truly meant helping. He fixes the faucet. I tell him which stories to leave alone. Every evening at six, when the game comes on, we leave the corduroy chair empty for a minute out of respect, and then Gus takes it, because he has earned the right. He sits there with his five dollar bills for the dump and tells us what the umpire should have called.