“Call the number on the card,” the letter ended. “Ask for Detective Hal Brodsky. Tell him that Curtis touched the windows.” I read it twice. Ernesto was still standing in the doorway of my kitchen with his hard hat in his hands, and out in the driveway I could see Curtis walking back and forth with his phone against his ear, laughing at something. I picked up the receiver of my old wall telephone, dialed the number, and a gravelly voice answered on the second ring. “Mrs. Banks,” it said. “I have been waiting five years for this call. Are you alone?”
“No,” I said. “I have an installer here, a man named Ernesto.” “Keep him with you,” said Hal Brodsky. “Do not say a word to Curtis. Do not sign anything. I am two and a half hours away in Erie, and I will be at your door by supper.” I hung up and sat down. Ernesto, who had not said a thing for a full minute, cleared his throat. “Mrs. Banks,” he began, and then paused, the way a gentleman does. “I need to show you something I should have shown you yesterday.”
He took a folded contract from his back pocket. It was the paper that Curtis had had me sign in September at the kitchen table, the one he called “the permits.” Ernesto had read it on the job site. “This is not a window contract,” he said. “Page three is a loan against the house. Thirty eight thousand dollars, with a financing fee. The lender is a company with the same address as a mailbox store, and the owner of the company, I checked on my phone, is the sister of Curtis.” He looked ashamed. “I work for a legitimate company. He hired me as a subcontractor. I thought it was strange. I did not know how strange.”
The windows of a house are its eyes, and a good husband paints them so that they will watch over his wife when he is gone.
Hal Brodsky arrived just before five, in a rusted blue sedan. He was a stout man of seventy with a white crew cut and eyes that had seen too many kitchens. He sat at my table with a mug of coffee and told me about Erie in 2015: a company called Keystone Home Solutions, fourteen elderly customers, four hundred ten thousand dollars gone, and a salesman who vanished the week the warrants were drafted. “His name was Curtis Vance,” the detective said. “He went by his middle name and his mothers maiden name after that. The face is the same face. Leon found him in 2020, in a newspaper photograph, and drove two hours to tell me.”
We made a plan at the table, the three of us, like conspirators in a play. I was to act as if nothing had changed. When Curtis came back in, I would pour him coffee. I would ask, politely, about the financing. Hal would wait in the dining room with a state investigator named Marcy Dean, who had arrived in a plain green car. Ernesto parked his truck across the end of the driveway, in the very place where Curtis liked to leave his own. My hands were steady, I noticed, in the way they had been when Leon died, with that strange flat calm that comes after the worst thing.
Curtis came in at dusk with a box of donuts. “Shirley, what a day,” he said, in his big salesmans voice. “Another week and you will have the warmest house on the block.” I poured him coffee. “Curtis,” I said, “tell me again about the financing. How much, exactly?” He laughed. “Peanuts. Monthly, hardly noticeable.” “Thirty eight thousand dollars is peanuts?” I asked. His smile held for one long second. Then Hal Brodsky stepped through the dining room door and said, very pleasantly, “Hello, Mr. Vance. It has been a long time.”
Curtis ran, naturally. He got as far as the porch, where he found the truck of Ernesto and two uniformed officers waiting on the lawn. My daughter, Denise, was just coming up the walk with a bag of takeout from her favorite restaurant. “Denise!” Curtis shouted. “Tell them! Tell them this is a mistake!” She stopped on the path, the bag swaying in her fingers. She looked at her husband, and at the officers, and at me in the doorway holding the newspaper clipping. Very slowly, she slid the ring off her finger and let it fall into the grass.
She sat on the front steps with me until the police car had gone. “I met him at the gym, Mom,” she said. “He remembered my mothers birthday. He brought you flowers.” I put my arm around her. “Your father found out in 2020 and tried to tell you,” I said. “Then he decided to wait. I think he was afraid you would not believe him.” She laughed bitterly through her tears. “I would not have,” she said. “That is the worst part. I would not have believed him for a second.”
Curtis Vance pleaded guilty to theft by deception, forgery, and a federal count of fraud, and he received a sentence of fourteen years. The loan against my house was voided by the court. The fourteen families from Erie received partial restitution from his seized accounts, and Hal Brodsky, who attended every hearing in a wrinkled suit, told me that it was the first time in ten years he had slept through the night. He still drives down from Erie every Christmas with a fruitcake that no one is brave enough to eat.
On Saturday morning, Ernesto came back in his own truck, with his teenage son, Mateo, riding beside him. “Mrs. Banks,” he said, “I could not put your old frames in the dumpster. I took them home.” In the bed of the truck, wrapped in blankets, were the sashes of Leon, every one of them, the glass wavy and old, the paint still marked with the brush strokes of the last summer. Ernesto and his son spent three weekends scraping and glazing and hanging them on new cords. When the last window slid up and down without a sound, I laid my cheek against the cool glass and wept.