Inside the white envelope were three things. A page printed off the home computer of Curtis, titled Durable Power of Attorney, with my name typed in and the signature line empty. A letter from a lender called Hawkeye Bridge Capital. And a note on yellow paper in the handwriting of my daughter. “Mom, I found these in his desk. I am sorry I laughed at the table. I have been sorry for years. Please do not sign anything. Janelle.” I read it twice behind my napkin, with Owen watching me over his paper plate. I put the envelope in my apron pocket and asked him whether volcanoes ever get tired.
The letter explained the number. Curtis had taken a photograph of the wire confirmation sheet from my purse, which I had left in the front hall of Janelle three weeks earlier. He used it to tell Hawkeye Bridge that his mother in law would guarantee a loan of four hundred thousand dollars. The money was to cover a bad investment in a medical supply warehouse in Coralville, which Curtis had hidden from my daughter. The power of attorney was the last piece. Once I signed, he could say my name to the lender any way he liked. He had counted on the old widow who works the key machine.
Monday morning, after my shift at the key machine, I climbed the stairs to my office above the First Avenue store and called Mr. Dvorak. He listened without interrupting, the way a good lawyer does. Then he called Marlene Tuttle at the bank on Third Avenue, who had known me since 1981. By noon the account had a spoken passcode and a rule that nothing moved without both of us in the room. “Imogene,” Mr. Dvorak said, “you could simply tell your son in law no.” “I could,” I said. “But I would like Janelle to see him say it.”
A secret envelope and a lawyer at the Christmas table turned a scheming son in law away from the savings of a hardware store owner in Cedar Rapids.
On Christmas Eve, Janelle hosted again. I brought my big pan of scalloped potatoes and a leather folder. This time I sat at the long table, in my regular seat, and nobody moved me. After pie Curtis cleared his throat and slid a paper beside my plate. “Just a formality, Imogene. For taxes.” I said that I always read things first. I read it aloud, slowly, the whole title, Durable Power of Attorney, and I watched the room go quiet. Janelle looked at her hands. Curtis laughed too loudly and said I was being dramatic. Then the doorbell rang, and Mr. Dvorak walked in with snow on his shoulders.
Mr. Dvorak did not raise his voice. He set the lender letter on the table beside my potatoes and said he had spoken that morning with a man at Hawkeye Bridge, who had been very interested to hear that the guarantor had never agreed to anything. He mentioned the photograph, the number and the state of Iowa, and the phrase “attempted fraud” came up once, gently. Curtis tried to say it was all a misunderstanding. Owen, who was under the table with the dog, said clearly, “Grandpa Curtis, you said she signs whatever Mom puts in front of her.” Nobody breathed. Then Janelle stood.
“Get your coat, Curtis,” my daughter said. I will remember her face as long as I live. She was not angry the way people are in movies. She was tired, and finished. Curtis stayed at the house of his brother in Marion for six weeks, and then a lawyer of his own explained what he owed. The lender took his car and his lake lot, and he went to work for his cousin in Dubuque. Janelle did not rush a decision about him. But she carried the folding chairs and the card table out to the garage that very night, and she shut the door.
Christmas morning, Owen knocked on my door before the sun was up, in dinosaur pajamas, with the dog behind him. He held out a crayon drawing of a long table with sixteen chairs and one tiny one. “That one is for the little table,” he explained. “So nobody has to sit there ever again.” I propped it on my refrigerator with the magnet shaped like a hammer from the old First Avenue store. He ate three pancakes at my counter and told me volcanoes are only the earth clearing its throat. I said that was the wisest thing I had heard all year, and I meant it.
I did not sell six stores for nothing. In January I met with Mr. Dvorak and the new owners from Ohio, and we did what I had planned since the signing. Every employee with ten years of service received a share of the sale, and each of them got it in a plain envelope, white, which made me smile. Mr. Pruett, who had run the lumber desk since 1989, cried into his apron. Then I put a smaller share into a college account for Owen and one into a trust for Janelle that only she can open. Nobody has to wait for me to pass. I like to watch.
Janelle came to see me at the store the next Saturday. She stood in the aisle with the nail bins, her coat buttoned wrong. “Mom, why did you never tell me?” “You never asked what was in the building,” I said. “You only asked what it smelled like.” She laughed, then wept, then laughed again. She asked whether it was too late to learn. I handed her a red apron from the hook behind the register and told her to start with the washers. She did, and she was terrible at it, and I have not been happier in years.
The following spring, on a Saturday morning, Owen stood on a milk crate at the key machine beside me, wearing an apron that came to his shoes. He had a brass blank in his small fingers. “Slowly,” I said. “Let the machine do the listening.” The cutter screamed, and a shower of tiny gold shavings fell, and when he held up his first key, still warm, he looked as proud as a man with a patent. I hung it on the nail beside the potbelly stove. Janelle took a photograph. At lunch, they sat me at the big table, and I let them.