Big Jim Tolliver did not answer his son. He sat in his wheelchair with one hand on the oxygen tube and the other gripping the arm of his chair, and the color that had drained from his face did not come back. Judge Harrell leaned forward, her reading glasses low on her nose. “Mr. Tolliver, the witness has asked one question,” she said. “I am inclined to allow an answer.” I am Linda Tolliver, sixty one years old, and I stood at the lectern with one photocopied page in my hand, and I let the silence do its work.
It was Pruett, the young lawyer for my husband, who broke it. “Your Honor, I object,” he said, and his voice cracked on the second word. “This is irrelevant to the division of property.” The judge raised one finger. “I will decide what is relevant, counselor.” Behind Big Jim, Brandi in the second row had stopped chewing her gum. Craig turned to his father again, and his voice dropped to a whisper that carried across the whole courtroom like a dropped glass. “Dad, who is Delbert Swain?”
Big Jim closed his eyes. “He was the building inspector for Tulsa County,” he said at last, in a thin dry voice. “In 1998 we had a church roof in Sand Springs. The trusses were wrong. I paid Swain two hundred and twelve thousand dollars to sign the inspection. That roof is still standing.” His chin trembled. “That money was how we got the contract for the school district. Everything after came out of that church roof, Craig. The company, the cabin, the house. All of it.”
A single photocopied ledger page gave one roofing company bookkeeper the length of a court hearing to bring her husband back to the truth in Tulsa.
I gave my terms from the lectern, quietly, turning to the judge. “Your Honor, I did not come here to destroy anyone. I came to ask for what the law gives a wife of thirty four years. Half of the business, since it was built by both of us, with the books to prove it. The house on Yale Avenue and the cabin on Grand Lake. And my share of the retirement accounts. I will turn over the ledger to the county, so that the church roof can be inspected and repaired, at the expense of the company. I ask nothing more.”
Craig put his hands flat on the table and stared at them, and when he looked up, he looked ten years older. “Linda, I moved the savings into my own account because Dad told me to,” he said. “I told myself it was strategy. Brandi was only the start. I have been spending the money of the company on trips and a boat and a condo, and I thought, Linda will never look.” He swallowed. “You were at that kitchen table every night at midnight. I never once asked what you were doing.”
But a frightened man looks for the quickest door. Craig lunged across the table, snatched the green ledger page from the hand of the clerk who had marked it as an exhibit, and bolted for the swinging doors at the back of the courtroom. He got halfway up the aisle. The bailiff, a broad man named Wendell, moved in from the wall. The court reporter stood up behind her machine. And seven women in the back row, every one of them from the library where I worked, rose together and filled the aisle, in cardigans and sensible shoes.
Craig stopped in the aisle of the courtroom with the page crushed in his fist, between the bailiff and the wall of librarians, the light from the tall windows falling on the dust over the old oak benches. Miss Pearl, the head librarian, who had been shelving books for forty years, spoke in a whisper that carried to the bench. “Mr. Tolliver, in my library, we do not take pages out of books.” A ripple of laughter ran through the courtroom. Craig looked at his wife. He walked back up the aisle and handed the clerk the page.
The consequences were sober. Judge Harrell granted a recess and then a settlement, which Pruett, after a hurried conference, accepted without a word. I received half of the business, the house on Yale Avenue, the cabin and a share of the accounts. Big Jim, in a separate matter, turned over the 1998 records to the county, and the church roof was inspected and reinforced at his own cost. The county sent an engineer to Sand Springs, and the trusses were replaced over a single summer, with the congregation holding a potluck on the lawn each Sunday while the work went on. He lived out his years quietly, I am told, and he never again raised his voice in my kitchen.
In the name of my mother Dolores, who passed in 2012, I started the Dolores Ames Fund. It pays for legal help for women facing divorce who cannot afford a lawyer and for bookkeeping courses for women who want to run their own businesses, in Tulsa, Creek and Rogers counties. In the first year we represented sixty one women and trained thirty seven bookkeepers. One was a fifty four year old from Sapulpa who filed her first set of books on her own kitchen table, and who sat back and said aloud, to nobody, that she had never felt so tall.
On a bright Friday in May, I stood at the reference desk of the Tulsa library in my navy dress and the pearl earrings of my mother, helping a young woman fill out a form. Behind me, the doors opened, and Craig came in, thinner, in a plain shirt, carrying a cardboard box of books for the sale table. He set it down and nodded. I nodded back. He had paid, and he had stopped drinking, and he had taken a job with a roofing outfit in Owasso. It was not forgiveness. But it was a beginning.