I walked through the glass door of Conference Room B in my slippers and my winter coat, and I said, in the voice I once used on customers who claimed I had shrunk their wool, “Good afternoon. Please put down the pen, Neil.” He did not put it down. He gave a small, mad laugh, as though I were a bad joke, and kept writing. I crossed the carpet and put my hand over the page. The attorney at the head of the table, a young man in rimless glasses, half rose from his chair. “Miss, this is a private closing,” he said. “I am the seller,” I answered. “It is my building.”
The silence in that room was a very expensive kind of silence. Neil took his hand away from the contract. Arthur, the old man with the white beard, sat very still in his chair, a brown wool cap beside his elbow, and for the first time in twenty two years I looked my brother in law in the face. His eyes were Mel eyes. That was almost the hardest thing. “Ruth,” he said hoarsely. “You are alive.” I said, “Arthur, I am eighty two and I walked here from my driveway by way of a bagel van. What did Neil tell you?”
Arthur put both hands on the table. “He told me you were in a nursing home in Plainview,” he said. “That you were not well, and that Sharon had your power of attorney. He said you could not sign because of the dementia, and that it would be a mercy to take the building off your hands.” He turned slowly toward Neil, whose smile had curdled. “He said you wanted me to have it. He said it was what Mel would have wanted. He said you had not asked to see me because you were ashamed.” He looked at me, and his voice broke. “Ruth, I did not know. I swear on my brother.”
A forged power of attorney was torn up in a Mineola conference room, an old feud ended over a stack of papers, and a bagel shop owner was invited to Passover.
Manny had come in behind me, flour still on his forearms, holding my purse. He set it quietly on the table and took out a folded paper that I had carried for six years and never shown to a soul. “Ruth, show him,” he said gently. I opened it. It was Mel will, in his own hand, notarized by Joyce, Manny wife, in 2015, and witnessed by Manny himself. I read the last line aloud. “To my brother Arthur, who should have had the building from the start, I leave my apology. To Ruthie, I leave the keys. Give him the key when he asks nicely.” Arthur put his face in his hands and began to sob.
The title company attorney had by now understood everything. He pressed a button on the desk and asked the receptionist to call a Nassau County detective, and, glancing at Neil, he told him not to leave. Neil rose anyway, white to the lips. “Ruth, it was Sharon idea,” he said. “She said you would never notice. She said you had no idea what the place was worth.” I looked at him. “She said that to you, Neil?” I asked softly. “Or did you say it to her?” He had no answer, and a uniformed officer stepped through the door, and then a plainclothes man, and Neil went with them without another word.
Sharon came to the house that evening. I had expected her to arrive in a fury, or in tears, but she arrived in her work clothes, with her hair in a plain clip, and she sat down at the kitchen table in Mel chair. “Ma,” she said, “I want you to know that I never signed anything. I let Neil do it. I stood in the other room while he held the pen. Because it was easier than saying no.” I took her hand. “Sharon, you let him do a terrible thing to your mother,” I said. “I will not tell you it does not matter. It matters. But I forgive you.”
Neil pleaded guilty to forging a power of attorney and attempted grand larceny, and he was sentenced to two years in a county facility and a fine. Sharon testified against him, and then she took a bus to Seaford every Thursday for a year to help me clear the nail salon accounts. She came to know every tenant by name. When she told me one day that she was divorcing Neil, she did not say it as a victim, but as a woman who had finally done her homework. I held her hand, and I told her that Mel would have been proud of her.
Arthur came to see me on a Tuesday. He stood on my front step, hat in hand, trembling slightly. “Ruth,” he said, “may I ask nicely?” I laughed until I cried. I took the old brass key from the nail by the door, the one to the cleaners, and I put it in his palm. We went to Seaford together. The shop on Merrick Road had stood empty for six years, but the steam press was still bolted to the floor. Arthur ran his hand over it like a man greeting an old dog. “Mel always said I could not iron a handkerchief,” he said. “He was right.”
We reopened it in May. Abramowitz Brothers Cleaners, Since 1976, Under New Management. Arthur grandson Eli runs the counter and I do the books, in a spiral notebook, on my stool by the window, the same way Mel did. The first customer through the door on opening day was Manny Feldstein, in his flour spattered apron, with a bag of bagels and a quart of chicken soup. He held up a stained tie. “Ruth, I will pay whatever you charge,” he said. “But only if you will let me bring you brunch every Thursday.” I said I would consider it.
At the Passover seder that spring, there were fourteen at my table. Sharon and her two boys. Arthur and his daughters. Manny and Joyce, who sat across from each other and argued about matzo ball texture. At the head, in Mel chair, I set a plate for the husband who had given me so much and asked so little. Arthur, as the eldest, read the passage about the stranger at the door. When he finished, he looked down the long table at me, and he said, “Ruth, this year I am not a stranger.” I said, “No, Arthur. You never were.”