“I know, Tyler,” I said, as gently as I have ever said anything. “And I am not breaking the promise. You are.” I held the last page up so the whole reunion could see that it was written in the square, careful print of my grandson, with a signature at the bottom and a date in July. His cousins stared. Kristine reached for it, and I held it out of her grasp. “Tyler came to me in the pump house three weeks ago,” I said. “He was crying so hard that he could not stand. He gave me this and asked me to hold it until he found the courage to say it himself.” Tyler took a ragged breath, standing on the edge of the dock.
He did say it. His voice cracked in the middle of the first sentence, and the little cousins in the water stopped splashing. “Grandma did not wander,” Tyler said. “My mother told me to walk her out to the bogs that night, in her nightgown, and leave her there. She said if people saw Grandma out in the dark, they would believe it.” He looked at his mother, and his chin shook. “I walked her out. I left. And then I turned around, and I sat at the end of the dike in the dark, and I watched her the whole time. I did not let her out of my sight until Jorge came with the truck.”
Kristine staggered back against the picnic table, her hand on her throat. “Tyler, that is a lie,” she said. “You are confused. You have been up all night for weeks.” Jorge stepped forward from the grill, taking off his cap. “Mrs. Sorensen, it is not a lie,” he said. “I saw the boy on the dike. He was crying like a child.” Kristine turned to me with wild eyes. “Mom, is that about Dad?” she asked, her voice thin. “Is that what the last page says? That Dad knew?” I did not answer at once. The truth was that Arne had known everything, and he had told Tyler on his last night.
A tray of cranberry bars set beside a folded page gave one grandmother the weekend to bring her grandson back to the lake house in Wisconsin Rapids.
I gave my terms standing on the grass, with the lake behind me and my cranberry bars on the table. The home equity loan would be set aside as a fraud, and my lawyer already had the petition drafted. The lake house would stay in my name. Tyler would enter a treatment program for gambling in Madison, and I would pay for it, and when he was well, he would go back to the university and finish his engineering degree. Kristine would withdraw every false statement she had made to my church friends. And the eight point three million dollars from the bogs would go into a trust for the family, paid out by a bank and never in cash.
Kristine sat down on the bench of the picnic table, as if her legs had been cut. For a long minute she stared at her hands. “Mom, I was so frightened,” she said. “Tyler owed so much. I thought if I could just get you declared unfit, we could sell the lake house and pay everybody. I did not think it would hurt you.” “I thought I was saving him.” I came around the table and sat beside her. “Kristine, you were not saving him,” I said. “You were drowning with him. There is a difference, and I am sorry it took so long to see.”
Tyler stepped off the dock and crossed the lawn on shaking legs. He knelt in front of me, in the grass, a twenty eight year old man with the jaw of his grandfather. “Grandma, I am so sorry,” he said. “I took the card. I took the Purple Heart to the pawn shop. I do not even know who I was.” I took his face in my cranberry stained hands. “Tyler, you are the boy who sat at the end of the dike in the dark,” I said. “That is who you are. The rest is only a sickness.” He leaned his forehead against mine.
The following week, Jorge and I drove into Wausau to the pawn shop. The owner, a stooped old man with a monocle, took the ticket from my hand and went into the back. He returned with a small velvet box, and inside was the Purple Heart of my husband, bright and unscratched. “I could not bring myself to put it in the window,” he said. “A fellow does not sell a thing like that.” I paid him the four hundred dollars and a hundred more for his trouble. In the truck, I held it against my chest. “Arne,” I said, aloud, “I am sorry it took me so long to fetch it.”
The money consequences were handled by the bank. The home equity loan was voided once my lawyer proved that the power of attorney was forged. The poker sites returned a part of the losses. Tyler completed ninety days at the treatment center in Madison, and when he came home, he carried a thick folder of readmission papers. On the first of every month, an envelope arrived at my door with ten dollars in it and a note that said, One day at a time, Grandma.
In the name of my husband, Arne, who passed in 2020 and who carved a thousand duck decoys with a pocketknife and a lamp, I started the Arne Decoy Fund. It pays for treatment, tuition and counseling for young adults in Wood and Portage counties who are lost to online gambling, and for the grandparents who stand between them and the edge. In the first year, we helped thirty three families. A young man of twenty three, in a hooded sweatshirt, held a small wooden duck that had been given to him at his graduation from the program and said, “I do not know why, but this makes me feel like somebody believes in me.”
In October, the marsh turned red, and we harvested the last bog under the new owners. Tyler stood waist deep in the water with a pair of waders and a boom, and Jorge beside him, shouting instructions. The berries floated like a field of rubies, and I stood on the dike with a thermos of coffee, wearing the Packers blanket over my shoulders. Kristine came and stood beside me, silent and gray, and after a while she took the thermos from my hand and poured herself a cup. We watched my grandson drag the boom across the red water. “Mom,” she said, “he looks like Dad.” I said, “He does.”