The woman who walked into the office of Diane Kessler three years ago with my driver license and my nurse badge was never me, and by the time I drove home from the baby shower in Plano with the quilt on the passenger seat, I knew exactly how to prove it. I am Carol Ann Dixon, seventy two years old, a retired NICU nurse of McKinney, Texas. Diane had sat in my car for an hour and told me everything. I had one piece of paper that she did not have. For thirty three years I had signed my name with a small loop on the C, and the signature on that closing paper had no loop.
On Monday morning I sat in the office of Diane on Preston Road with a magnifying glass, and I laid my real driver license beside the copy in her file. The photograph on the copy was not my face. It was a woman of about sixty with a small mole near her left eye, wearing a pair of glasses on a gold chain. The nurse badge was a color copy with my name and a hospital seal that had been changed by one digit. Diane covered her mouth. “That is the woman who handed me the cashier check,” she said. “I never saw her again.”
It took Diane two days to find the rest. The cashier check for three hundred and ten thousand dollars had been drawn on the account of a dental supply company in Frisco, and the man who ran its books was named Gary Hale. Kendall had always called him Daddy. Last spring, the company had reported a loss of more than three hundred thousand dollars to the police and told them nothing else. A man cannot hide such money in his own name. He can hide it in the name of a nurse, in the house of a son in law.
A forged driver license and a nurse badge gave one retired nurse the length of a Sunday dinner to bring her daughter in law back to the truth in McKinney.
I gave my terms at the kitchen island in the house on Preston Road on Sunday afternoon, with the sun on the marble and my quilt folded over my arm. Ryan had come home from work at my call, with a puzzled face, and Kendall stood at the stove in an apron, very still. Her mother Marcia and her father Gary sat at the table with glasses of iced tea. “Kendall, I have the license, and the badge, and a witness who saw the woman. I am not here to ruin anybody. I am here to hear you say, in front of my son, whose money bought this house.”
Kendall put down her wooden spoon and gripped the edge of the counter, and for a long moment her pretty face looked very young. “Carol, it was the money of Daddy,” she said, in a whisper. “He took it from the company. He was scared. He said that if the house was in the name of Ryan, and the money looked like it came from you, nobody would ever look. I did not want to do it. But I slapped you at the shower because Aunt Diane was sitting at table three, and I was frightened she would say something.” She turned to my son. “Ryan, I am so sorry. I should have told you the first night.”
Marcia did not wait for her husband to speak. She snatched the folder of closing papers and the plastic bag with the false license and badge from the island, rose from her chair with a clatter, and hurried through the garage door toward her white Lexus, meaning to drive away and burn the evidence in a barrel at the lake house. Her heels clicked on the concrete. Gary called out her name. Ryan lunged after her. And at the foot of the driveway, with its engine running, an SUV swung sideways across the opening and stopped.
Marcia stopped at the car door with the folder pressed to her blouse, because the SUV of her own sister blocked the driveway, and Diane Kessler stepped out of it in her real estate blazer with her telephone raised. “Marcia, I have been filming since the sidewalk. Plano police are four minutes away. I told you three years ago that I did not like how that check looked. Put the papers on the hood.” Marcia looked at her sister, then at Ryan, standing in the garage door with his face stricken. Her shoulders went down, and she laid the folder on the warm hood of the Lexus.
The consequences were swift and heavy. Gary Hale was charged with embezzlement and Marcia with forgery and identity theft, and the woman with the mole turned out to be a cousin from Oklahoma who cooperated for a lighter sentence. The house on Preston Road was sold, and the money returned to the company. Ryan and Kendall moved into a small rental in Allen, and Kendall found a job as a receptionist. She did not ask me for anything. She only came to my door the day before the baby was born, and said she knew she did not deserve it.
In the name of my mother Ruth, who passed in 2003, I started the Ruth Dixon Fund. It pays for hand sewn blankets and nearby lodging for the parents of premature babies in neonatal care and for legal help for people whose names and licenses have been stolen, in Collin, Dallas and Denton counties. In the first year we gave out four hundred and twenty quilts and cleared the names of sixty one victims of identity theft. One was a forty year old father from Frisco who slept in a chair for eleven weeks beside his tiny daughter and wept when he saw her wrapped in a yellow duck quilt.
On a bright morning in April, I sat in a rocking chair in the nursery of a small rental in Allen, with a baby girl in my arms wrapped in the quilt with forty two blocks and tiny yellow ducks. Ryan stood in the doorway with his hand over his heart. Kendall knelt beside the chair, her eyes red, and put one finger in the hand of the baby. “Carol,” she said, “would you like to teach me how to stitch?” I looked at her for a long moment. Then I reached for my sewing basket, and I said we would begin with the corners.