The envelope in the hand of Frank DeLuca had a green wax seal on the back, and when he held it up for two hundred people to see, even the keg at the end of the hall seemed to hold its breath. I am Walter Kaminski, sixty seven years old, retired from Caterpillar, and I stood at the front of the VFW hall in Peoria in my gray suit with a plate of sheet cake in my hand. My son Jason stood on the little stage with the microphone cord wrapped around his fingers, and his face was the color of the frosting. “Frank,” he said, “this is not the time.”
But Frank had never in his life been moved by a man telling him what the time was. He answered the question that he had asked. In September, Jason had come to the nursing home with a notary and a lawyer named Voss, while Frank lay half asleep from the medicine, and they had put a paper on the tray in front of him. It was a quitclaim deed to the house on Moss Avenue, the house Frank owned, transferring it to Jason alone. Frank had been unable to hold the pen. A nurse named Tamika had walked in and stopped it.
Frank told the hall the rest in a voice like gravel in a bucket. He had a copy of the paper, and the statement of Tamika, and the name of the notary who had stamped it without witnessing a signature. He opened the envelope with a trembling thumb. Inside was the real deed, signed by Frank two weeks before, transferring the house on Moss Avenue to me alone, with thirty years of rent forgiven. I heard a sound come out of my own chest. I looked at my son, who had begun to back toward the side door.
A microphone passed to a ninety one year old foreman gave one retired forklift driver the length of a retirement party to bring his son back to the truth in Peoria.
I gave my terms from the floor of the hall, with my plate set down on a folding table and two hundred friends of mine standing very still. “Jason, come down off that stage. You will stand here beside me, in front of these people, and you will tell us all what you were doing in that nursing home, and why. I am not going to shout. Your mother never allowed shouting in her kitchen. But you are my son, and I think it is time somebody in this family told the truth out loud.”
Jason came down the steps slowly, with the microphone still in his hand, and his voice came out of the speakers, small and shaky. “Dad, I owe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “I lost it putting money into a fake investment that a man at my office told me about. They sent letters. They called me at night. I knew the house belonged to Frank, and I knew you were going to get it, and I thought, if I had it first, I could borrow against it. I thought nobody would be hurt.” He looked at Frank, who sat very still. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, Frank.”
Then Jason did the only thing he could think of. He dropped the microphone with a squeal of feedback, lunged at the wheelchair, snatched the envelope with the real deed from the fingers of Frank, and sprinted down the center of the hall toward the double doors, meaning to run to his car and tear the deed to pieces in the parking lot. The crowd gasped. The cake slid off a plate. A woman screamed. And in front of the doors, in a line, shoulder to shoulder, stood the entire second shift of the Caterpillar plant.
Jason skidded to a stop in front of the doors, with the envelope in his fist, and sixty men in work boots and VFW caps looked at him without moving. The biggest of them, a shop steward named Big Eddie Sobczak with arms like tree trunks, spoke in a voice so calm it was frightening. “Kid, I worked under Frank DeLuca for thirty years. Every man in this room owes him something. You are not leaving this hall with that paper.” Jason looked at the faces. He looked back at his father, standing alone in the middle of the floor. His fingers opened, and Eddie caught the envelope in the air.
The consequences were not gentle, but they were just. Frank turned the house over to me that week, and I put my son in the position of paying rent to me, a hundred dollars a month, until his debt to the men who cheated him was settled. The lawyer and the notary were reported to the state, and the nurse Tamika received a letter from the governor. Jason went to a counselor, and then to the police about the man at his office, and the man at his office went to prison. My son moved out in the spring, and he washed his own dishes.
In the name of my wife Dorothy, who passed in 2023, I started the Dorothy Kaminski Fund. It pays for rides to cancer screenings for women in small towns and for legal help for retired factory workers pressured to sign over their homes, in Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford counties. In the first year we drove nine hundred women to screenings and helped sixty three retirees keep their houses. One was a seventy four year old widow from Pekin who held her appointment card against her coat and said she had not had a checkup since her husband stopped driving.
On a warm evening in June, I sat on the front porch of the house on Moss Avenue with Frank DeLuca in his wheelchair beside me, a pair of cold beers, and a crossword in pen on my knee. Jason came across the lawn pushing a mower, shirtless and sunburned, and waved at us with a gloved hand. Frank chuckled. “Walt,” he said, “a man should finish what he starts.” I handed him the crossword, and I told him that eleven across was still empty, and neither of us had the word.