I opened the leather folder on my lap and slid the last paper across the table to my daughter. It was a single sheet on heavy letterhead, and the logo at the top was a small gear inside a circle, in dark blue. “Read it, Becky,” I said. She did, and her lips moved as she read, as they did when she was learning her letters. “Purchase agreement,” she said. “Leonard Dombrowski, seller. Dombrowski Precision Machine, Incorporated. Buyer, Kessler Werke, Stuttgart. Total consideration: nine million, seven hundred thousand dollars.” She looked up. “Dad, you sold the shop.” “In April,” I said. “I told your mother. I did not tell you, because I wanted to be the one to show you.”
Carol made a sound like a kettle just before whistling. My sister is seventy one years old, and she has spent most of that time believing that she was owed a bigger piece of everything. “Nine million,” she said. “Leonard, you are a fool. A man with that much money does not need to keep it in the family.” “I have kept it in the family,” I said. “That is the point.” I turned the page over. There, on the back, was a second document, which I had asked my lawyer in Pittsburgh to draw up the same week I received the lab results. “This is my trust,” I said. “One part goes to Ann. One part goes to the shop employees. And the last part goes to my only daughter, Rebecca Dombrowski, who has the eyes of her grandmother.”
Carol went rigid. She stared at the paper, then at Becky, and I watched her whole life of scheming collapse on her face. “Leonard, the lab was a mistake,” she said weakly. “The lab was not a mistake,” said Becky quietly. She had begun to cry, but her voice was steady. “I took the test myself, Aunt Carol. In Cleveland, with my father, on a Tuesday. I did it because for thirty years I have heard you whisper that I was not his child, and I wanted to put it to rest for myself, not for you.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “It was ninety nine point nine nine percent. I am my father daughter. I always was.”
A letter from a German company on a leather folder revealed what the machine shop was really worth and who it was for.
For a long time no one said a word. The pot roast had gone cold on its platter. Outside, the October light slanted across the lawn where Becky used to ride her bike, and I thought about how many Sundays I had sat at this table and let my sister poison the dinner with her little remarks. I had told myself it kept the peace. Now I knew that it kept nothing. “Carol,” I said. “You will apologize to my daughter. Right now. Not for me. For the girl who came home from school at the age of nine and asked her mother why Aunt Carol said she did not look like Daddy.” Carol opened her mouth, and for a moment I thought she would refuse.
She did not refuse. I will give her that much. She sat very straight, her hands folded, and her chin trembled, and she said, in the thinnest voice I had ever heard from her, “Rebecca, I am sorry.” “For what?” said Becky. “For all of it,” said Carol. “I was jealous of your mother. I said it because it hurt, and I liked that it hurt, and I have been ashamed of it for a long time.”
Becky looked at her aunt for a very long time. Then she got up, walked around the table, and bent and put her arms around her. Carol sat stiff as a board, and then she crumpled. Two women, seventy one and forty nine, wept in my dining room.
That left Scott. My nephew is a heavy, soft man with a gold watch, and he had been leaning forward, ready to speak, and I had to put my hand up to stop him. “Scott, the power of attorney is revoked. The bank has the order. The notary in your building has been interviewed by a Pittsburgh detective, and she has told them everything, including the fact that I was not in the room.” He went the color of putty. “Uncle Leonard,” he said. “Eighty six thousand dollars. I will pay it back. Every cent. Please.” I considered him. “You will pay it back by Friday. And you will meet with the district attorney on Monday, and give a statement.”
Scott paid the eighty six thousand dollars by Thursday, by selling his boat and borrowing against his house. The district attorney reduced the charge in return for his testimony against the notary, and he received two years of probation and a record that will follow him the rest of his life. I did not enjoy it. I want to say that plainly. A man should not enjoy the ruin of a nephew, even a bad one. But I was not willing to have my signature forged and call it a family matter. There are things that a man can forgive and things that he must see answered for, and I did both.
Carol wrote to me every month for the next year, short letters in her old careful script. I did not answer the first ten. The eleventh I answered. On a Sunday in May I invited her to supper, and she came, wearing a plain blue dress, and brought a pie. It was a bad pie. I ate two slices. She was quieter than I remembered. She helped Becky load the dishwasher. At the door she took my hand with both of hers, and I understood that something had finally been set down, a stone that she had carried since 1976.
The shop employees received their share in January. Sixty one people, delivered in envelopes by Becky and me in the shop break room, with doughnuts. A machinist named Lou, who had worked for me for thirty four years, cried so hard that I had to bring him a chair. Becky, who had taught school for twenty six years on a salary that barely covered her rent, retired that June. In September she and I drove to Cleveland, to the laboratory, to say thank you in person. The technician was baffled. We left a plate of cookies and a note that read simply, Dad.