“…that lien is still good, Joanie, and any title company that missed it will be sorry,” Ed Kowalski said in his gruff old voice, and I pressed the telephone against my ear in my kitchen in Scranton and felt my knees go weak with relief. I was holding the yellow napkin from Denny, with Vince blue ballpoint signature, in my free hand. Ed was eighty three years old, and had been practicing law since the Kennedy administration, and he spoke as though he had been waiting thirteen years to say those words. He told me to be at his office on Spruce Street at nine the next morning, with the napkin, the letter, and a strong cup of coffee.
His office was a narrow brick building with a brass plaque and a radiator that clanked. Ed sat behind an enormous desk piled with files, in a brown cardigan, with white hair standing straight up like a dandelion. He rose when I came in, with the stiff dignity of old men, and took both my hands. He said, “Lou was the best friend I ever had.” He opened a drawer and took out a thick folder tied with a string. Inside, in a plastic sleeve, was the lien, stamped and recorded at the Lackawanna County courthouse in 2012.
It said that Vincent Moretti and Moretti Pizza Incorporated were indebted to Louis and Joan Ricci in the amount of sixty two thousand dollars, with interest at five percent, and that the debt was secured against the real estate at 118 Wyoming Avenue. It was signed by Ed, notarized, and dated. It had been renewed every five years, as the law required, by a calendar reminder that Ed secretary set up in 2012. “Every five years,” he said. “I told Lou I would never let it lapse. I did not.”
A napkin signed in blue ballpoint, a lien renewed every five years, and two sisters with pancakes at Denny.
He made three telephone calls while I sat in a leather chair, sipping the strongest coffee of my life. The first was to the title company that had handled the sale of the restaurant. A woman there put him on hold for ten minutes. The second was to the buyer attorney in Wilkes Barre. The third was to the county recorder. At the end of the third call, he put down the receiver, looked at me over his glasses, and said, “Joan, it appears the title examiner who handled that closing had a very busy Friday, and missed a lien.”
He did not use the word negligence. He did not need to. He explained that the title company, if the lien were proven valid, would be liable to pay the debt, or the buyer would, or Vince would, or all three would argue about it until the cows came home. “But,” he said, with a gleam in his eye, “the title company has insurance. And I know the vice president personally.” He picked up the telephone and made a fourth call, and within an hour the vice president had agreed to meet us at two o clock.
The meeting was brief and almost gentle. The vice president, a nervous man with a bad toupee, examined the lien and the recording stamp. He apologized three times. He said that the company would, of course, be glad to make the Riccis whole, and asked if a check could be prepared within the week. Ed said that the full amount, with five percent interest compounded for the years since 2012, came to a little over ninety four thousand dollars, and that it would be appreciated if the check were cut in my name.
I sat there like a stone. I had come to Ed hoping for the return of the sixty two thousand. I had not dared to think of interest. When the vice president wrote the figure on his legal pad and underlined it, I began to laugh, then to cry, and Ed handed me his white handkerchief, which smelled of pipe tobacco and starch. I thought of Lou, at that Denny, with a cup of decaf and a napkin, saying firmly, “Vince, you write it down.” I thought: he never forgot.
My sister Angela came to my condo that evening. She had heard from the title company. She stood on my doormat in her good wool coat, a small woman of seventy, with her hands clasped in front of her, and she looked as though she had not slept in a month. She said she had known about the napkin. She said she had begged Vince to honor it, and that he had refused, and that she had been too afraid to speak. “I am a coward, Joanie,” she said. “I have been a coward for fifteen years.”
I made her tea. We sat at my kitchen table, two old women who had shared a bedroom as girls in a row house in Dunmore, and I told her that I did not want an apology from a coward. I wanted a sister. I told her that Vince could pay what he owed Ed, and the title company, between them, and that I had no desire to destroy them. But I asked her to tell me, honestly, whether she had ever been happy in that marriage. She was silent for a long time. Then she said, “Not since the napkin.”
The following Saturday, Angela and I went to Denny on Wyoming Avenue, the same one, with the same cracked vinyl booths, and we ordered pancakes. I had brought the napkin in a clear plastic sleeve. I set it on the table between the syrup and the ketchup. We looked at it for a long while, the two of us. Then Angela reached across and took my hand, and the waitress, a girl of nineteen with a pierced eyebrow, came by with the coffee pot and said, “You two look like you have a story.” We said that we did, and we told it, over pancakes, all the way through.