The woman who called Dr. Varga was Tammi Brandt, the sister of Brad, the man my daughter in law married after my son Mark passed. I learned it in the dean office at Clarkson College on a Friday afternoon, when Ellen Varga turned her phone around and played me the voicemail the caller had left. A bright, hurried voice said, “Hi, this is Mavis Okerlund, I need to move the last semester payment to a different account, here is the routing number.” Dr. Varga looked at me. “Mavis, I trained you. You never once said hi to me in your life. You said, Varga, report.”
The caller had given the number of a bank in Lincoln. Dr. Varga phoned the bank with the lawyer of the college on the line, and a very polite manager explained that the account belonged to a company called Brad and Courtney Holdings, opened in June. I sat very still. Twenty two thousand dollars of my savings, the money I had paid in the spring for the final semester of Lauren, was supposed to go there. The phone behind the voicemail had been bought at a Walgreens on Maple Street. A friend of Dr. Varga at the police department pulled up the store camera. It showed a woman in a gray fleece, a ball cap and sunglasses.
I knew that walk. Not the face, the walk. It was the quick, bent forward walk of Tammi Brandt, who runs a hair salon in Papillion and has come to every Okerlund Christmas since Courtney remarried, holding a casserole nobody asked for. Courtney had asked her to make the call because Tammi once did voices in a community theater production of Steel Magnolias. They needed a woman who could sound old. They did not need a woman who knew what a nursing pin was. I thanked Dr. Varga, asked for a copy of everything and drove home to Benson in the dark, humming the old hymn Gene used to whistle in the yard.
A voicemail gave one daughter in law the length of a Friday afternoon to bring a grandmother back to the truth in Omaha.
I gave my terms to Courtney and Brad on Saturday morning in the lobby of Clarkson College, an hour before the pinning rehearsal, because I wanted it to happen in a place with cameras and good lighting. I brought Dr. Varga, a lawyer named Hal Sorensen and a manila envelope. I told Courtney and Brad that the money would be back in my account by Monday, that the company account would be closed, and that neither of them would say one word to Lauren about any of it before her pinning. I told them they could sit in the back row and take photographs, just as they had planned for me.
Courtney did not argue. She sat on the bench by the trophy case, took off her sunglasses and told me everything in a flat voice. She said that after Mark passed she felt like a guest in her own family, and that Brad had made her feel the world owed her something. She said they believed the money was theirs, since it would have gone to Lauren anyway. She said Tammi made the call and she herself wrote the script. Then she added, quieter, “I did not think you would check.” I told her I checked tubes and charts at three in the morning for thirty five years. I check everything.
Brad stood there with his jaw tight. Then he snatched the envelope out of my hand, meaning to run it into the parking lot and tear up the papers, and he bolted for the glass doors with Hal Sorensen shouting behind him. Dr. Varga did not move, because she had seen worse in forty years of running a nursing college. I did not move either. I just said, loudly, to the whole lobby, “Please, nobody get hurt.” A student in scrubs near the water fountain looked up, then at Brad, and then the whole lobby seemed to turn its head at once like a flock of geese.
Brad hit the doors at full speed just as the sophomore class came through them, thirty nursing students in white caps and blue scrub tops, singing the school song while carrying trays of cupcakes for the rehearsal. He went into the trays face first. Frosting on his collar, sprinkles in his hair, a cupcake in each pocket. The students gathered around him with sympathy, offering napkins and a bottle of water, and a tall girl named Imani said, “Sir, you really should sit down.” He sat. The envelope slid across the tile to the shoes of Dr. Varga, who picked it up and handed it to me without a word.
By Monday the twenty two thousand dollars was back in my account, and the company account at the Lincoln bank was closed. Hal Sorensen sent a letter to Tammi Brandt that the owner of her salon found very interesting. Brad lost his job at the insurance office, because his manager happened to be a graduate of Clarkson. Courtney called me twice in January and I let it go to voicemail both times, and then in February I called her back and we talked for an hour about Mark. She cried. I did not. I told her I would see her at Easter dinner, and that she would be bringing the rolls.
In the name of Gene, who passed in 2020, I started the Gene Okerlund Pocket Watch Fund. It pays for tuition, scrubs and clinical shoes for nursing students whose families fell short in Douglas, Sarpy and Washington counties. In the first year we put fourteen students into their white caps, and the first was a night shift cashier from Bellevue named Rosalind who told me she had been wearing the same pair of sneakers for two years. Dr. Varga says the fund is the only line item at Clarkson she has ever read twice. Every recipient gets a pocket watch from the same pawn shop on Dodge Street, the way Gene always carried one on the Union Pacific.
At the pinning on the following Friday I sat in the third row, not the back, in my best blue dress with the old nursing pin of Methodist Hospital on my collar. Lauren walked across the stage, and when her pin went on she looked at me instead of the photographers and mouthed, “Grandma.” Courtney sat in the back row with her camera, and she waved. I waved back. Afterward, in the lobby, Lauren put her arms around my neck so hard my glasses went crooked, and Dr. Varga slipped me a cupcake from the tray that had survived. It was vanilla. It was perfect.