I opened the laundry room door and walked through my own kitchen with my bowl of chili, past my son and my daughter in law, and went to answer the doorbell myself. Rick followed three steps behind, still holding his beer. On the porch, in the cold, stood a man I had not seen in seven years, with a Brown County deputy beside him. His name was Sal Brzezinski. He had been the business partner of Rick in Appleton until 2016. He wore his old Packers stocking cap, and he looked at Rick the way a man looks at a snake he has finally cornered.
Rick let out a long breath, and the beer slipped from his hand onto my kitchen floor. “Sal,” he said. “It is the Super Bowl. What are you doing here?” Sal held up a folded paper. “I have a judgment against you for four hundred ten thousand dollars,” he said. “Eight years of interest, Rick. Pal called me at 5:48 and told me about the sixteen hundred thousand dollars in cash you borrowed against the county contracts. A judge in Appleton signed a garnishment this afternoon. The deputy here is going to serve it.”
Brian stared at the paper. Jenna put a hand to her throat. Rick said it was a mistake, and the deputy said it was not a mistake. He read the order aloud, very clearly, and I stood in my own front hall with my bowl of chili listening to a man lose what he had spent on a plan to take my life work. My late wife, Margie, would have been standing right beside me, saying nothing, arms crossed. I felt her there. The Packers scored a field goal in the living room, and nobody cheered.
A doorbell ringing at halftime gave one widower the evening to bring his son back to his senses in Green Bay.
I gave my terms in the kitchen, with the chili cooling on the stove. “Rick, you will leave my house. Your granddaughter will keep her place at my table, but you will not. Brian, you and I are going to sit down tomorrow morning and talk about what you did and what you want. And Jenna, you will stay out of this company for the rest of your life.” They all stood there in the yellow light, and for once nobody said a word about the game. I added that the chili was still free for anyone who asked politely. The only sound was the refrigerator humming, and the chair of Margie creaking softly in the other room.
Brian slid down against the cabinet and put his head on his knees. He told me he had been scared since the day Jenna told him Rick could make him rich. He wanted to be the man she thought he was. Rick promised that merging with a bigger company would make him a real vice president, with his own parking space. “I did not read it, Dad,” he said into his knees. “I signed it because I wanted her father to like me.” I told him that is the most expensive reason in the world, and he laughed in a ragged way.
Rick set down what was left of his beer, then tried to slip past me to the back door with the merger agreement folded under his shirt. He got to the mudroom. It was blocked by the broad shoulders of Stan Nowicki, who had driven over from the equipment yard and had been standing in the garage for ten minutes, waiting for the signal. “Rick,” Stan said, “I have been driving trucks for Pal for twenty nine years. You are not taking that paper out of this house.” Rick surrendered the agreement, and Stan handed it to me like a loaf of bread.
Brian and I talked until two in the morning. He agreed to step down as vice president, take a year working on a paving crew from the bottom, and earn his way back. Jenna cried at the table for an hour. Then she did something I did not expect. She picked up the dish towel and dried the chili pot, wordlessly, while I washed. Margie used to say you can tell a lot about a person from how they treat the dishes of another woman. I decided to give her one more chance.
The money consequences fell on Rick. The garnishment took the sixteen hundred thousand dollars he borrowed, and Sal got paid in full. The county never withdrew the contracts. My friend the highway commissioner called the next morning to say nothing had changed, and nothing would. Rick sold his house in Appleton and his two paving rigs, and he moves slowly now, working for a hardware store. Kowalski Paving is still mine, and Brian signs nothing without me. We bid on a new county road in March and won it with an honest price.
In the name of Margie, who passed in 2022, I started the Margie Kowalski Fund. It pays for commercial driver training, work boots and tools for young road crew workers in Brown, Outagamie and Oconto counties. In the first year we trained eighteen drivers. A twenty year old from Pulaski who had been working at a gas station got his CDL and drove a dump truck for the first time in April. He called me from the cab and said it felt like flying. I told him to watch his mirrors.
The next Super Bowl, I made two pots of chili again, and set a place at the table for every person who walked through the door. Brian carried the pots. Jenna set out the paper bowls, and she put the best one in front of my chair. The recliner of Margie was empty, so I sat in it myself, with my feet up, and asked my granddaughter to sit on the arm. We watched the Packers lose in the fourth quarter, and for once nobody minded at all. Even the beagle named Lambeau that Brian brought home lay across my feet, snoring through the whole fourth quarter.