“…the woman at booth nine with Brandon was…” I could say now, calmly, with a cup of coffee in my hand, but at the time I sat on a box of cocktail napkins in the manager office at Mancini and read the curly signature on the credit card slip three times before I believed it. Stacy Moore. Not a stranger. Not a girlfriend from some distant city. Stacy Moore was the real estate agent who had come to my house in September, with a clipboard and a bright smile, to tell me how lovely my green shag carpet was, and how nice it would be to help me downsize.
I thanked Gina and asked her not to say a word. She promised. She put the receipt in an envelope and handed it to me, and I tucked it in my shirt pocket next to the two dollar scratch off ticket Brandon had given me. On the drive home through the dark, cold streets of Parma, I did not turn on the radio. I thought about Dolores, who used to say that the best way to handle a bully is to let him build his own gallows, one carefully chosen board at a time. I decided right there, on that quiet road, that I would be patient, and that I would do nothing until I knew every board in that gallows by name.
On Monday morning I drove downtown and walked into the office of Mr. Irving Felder, who had been my lawyer since 1974. He was a short, round man of eighty with a bow tie, and when I laid the napkin and the receipt on his desk, he read them with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He said, “Dale, you have never owned a credit card.” I said, “That is correct.” He said, “Then someone applied for one in your name. That is a federal offense.” I said I had hoped he would say that.
A folded napkin under a saucer, a black credit card in the wrong name, and a Thursday night booth beside booth nine.
Mr. Felder made three telephone calls. The first was to the bank that had issued the black card. The second was to an investigator he trusted, a retired detective named Martha Quinn. The third was to my granddaughter Ashley, whom he asked, in his gentle courtroom voice, to meet us at his office on Thursday afternoon, and not to tell her husband. By Wednesday evening, we had learned that the card had been opened in April with a forged application, a photocopy of my driver license, and a signature that was not mine. The balance stood at eighty four thousand dollars.
On Thursday, at seven in the evening, I walked into Mancini Steakhouse wearing my old brown cardigan and my Browns cap, as I always did. Gina saw me at the door and her eyes widened. She seated me at booth ten, directly beside booth nine, and brought me a cup of coffee. Ashley sat across from me, very pale, with her hands in her lap. Mr. Felder sat in the corner, behind a menu. At seven fifteen, Brandon strolled in, with Stacy on his arm, laughing, in a camel coat and a silk scarf.
They saw us at once. Brandon stopped in the middle of the aisle. Stacy let go of his arm. I raised my coffee cup in a small salute. I said, pleasantly, “Evening, Brandon. Evening, Miss Moore. I understand you two enjoy the tomahawk. I thought I would join you tonight.” Nobody breathed. Ashley stood up. She looked at her husband, and at the woman beside him, and her face went through every color I know. Then she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, “Brandon, I want you to explain the black card.”
I will not repeat what he said. It was not impressive. He stammered. He blamed the bank. He blamed Stacy. He said it had all been a misunderstanding, a business arrangement, a way to help me manage my money. Stacy, to her credit, said very little. She turned and walked out of the restaurant with her purse clutched to her chest. And Mr. Felder, rising from his corner, quietly handed Brandon an envelope with the seal of the Cuyahoga County Court. It was a restraining order, and a copy of a criminal complaint.
Ashley filed for divorce on Monday. She wept for a week, in my kitchen, with her head on the green shag carpet she had always teased me about. Then, one afternoon, she lifted her face, wiped her eyes, and asked me, with a trembling smile, what I intended to do with the plumbing money. I told her the truth. Six million four hundred thousand dollars. She stared at me. Then she began to laugh, a real laugh, the first in weeks. She said, “Grandpa, you let him buy you a scratch off.”
I did not forget Gina. On a rainy Thursday in December, I walked into Mancini one last time, and sat in booth nine, and ordered the tomahawk. When the bill arrived, I paid it with cash. I left a tip of five thousand dollars, in an envelope, with a note that read: For the kindness of a napkin. Gina cried in the kitchen for ten minutes. Then she came out and sat beside me and told me that she had a daughter at Cleveland State, working toward her nursing degree, and that she had been working double shifts to pay for it.
I paid the rest of that tuition. Not as charity. As a debt of honor. And on my way out, I took the scratch off ticket from my shirt pocket, where it had been sitting since the birthday dinner, and I asked Gina for a quarter. I scratched it, slowly, right there at the table, while Ashley and Gina leaned in. We read it together. Two dollars. I laughed so hard I had to put down my coffee. “Well,” I said, wiping my eyes, “that is more than my grandson in law ever won.”