“…her name was Margaret Ellison,” I whispered, and the words came out of me the way breath leaves a person who has been struck. Margaret. My Margaret, who had taught second grade for thirty five years, who had brought a pound cake to my door on the day Harold passed, who sat at my kitchen table every Sunday afternoon with her crossword and her glass of iced tea. Dr. Ferris held the phone steady in his hand. At the top of the screen, in tidy typed letters, were her name, her date of birth, and a diagnosis I had not known about. Stage two. The same words my son had said to me.
I sat down on the Buick bumper, in my church shoes, with the sun going down behind the lake. Dr. Ferris sat beside me. He did not speak for a while. Then he said, gently, “Mrs. Dunn, this is a real record. I believe it belongs to your friend, and I believe she had the treatment, and I believe she recovered. Your son did not invent a disease. He borrowed one.” I asked how. He said, “Somebody who had access.” And I thought, slowly, of Jenna, who worked in medical billing at the big hospital in town.
The party went on above us. I could hear the music and the laughter, and the clink of glasses. I could see Todd silhouetted on the deck, with a drink in his hand, telling a story. I felt as though I were watching a stranger through a window. All those years of birthday cakes, of Little League, of second jobs and secondhand shoes, so that he could stand on a deck above a lake. I took a breath. I said, “Dr. Ferris, I would like to make a telephone call. May I borrow your porch?”
A Buick parked out on the stone road, a retired oncologist in a fishing vest, and a name at the top of a stolen medical record.
He took me to his own house next door, a small gray cabin with a screened porch and a hound dog. He made me a cup of tea. I called Margaret on the landline. She answered on the second ring, in the soft voice I knew by heart. I did not say much. I asked whether she had been sick. She was silent for so long I thought the line had gone silent. Then she said, “Barbara, how did you know?” I said I would come over in the morning. She said, “I did not want to worry you. It was a long time ago.”
In the morning I drove to her little apartment in Nixa, with a coffee cake from the Hy Vee. She told me the whole story. Two years earlier she had been diagnosed, and treated, and cured, and had told almost no one. She had been afraid of pity. Only Jenna had known, because Jenna had processed the claims. Margaret said, her eyes filling, “She sat with me in the waiting room once and held my hand. I thought she was kind.” I put my arms around her. We both cried, in the sun, over a coffee cake.
That afternoon, Dr. Ferris and Margaret and I sat in the office of an attorney in Springfield named Mr. Abernathy, a spare, courteous man in a bow tie. He listened to everything. He looked at the wire records, the forged clinic papers, the stolen medical file. Then he put down his pen and said, in a quiet voice, “Mrs. Dunn, your son has committed wire fraud and medical identity theft. Jenna has committed a federal privacy crime. It is my duty to tell you that I think you have a strong case.”
I said I did not want to ruin my son. Mr. Abernathy said that I did not need to. He said there was a way to give Todd a choice. A letter would go to him, setting out the evidence, and offering that he return the money in full, and sign a written confession, and Jenna would resign her position. If he did, the matter would stay private. If he did not, it would go to the authorities. I read the letter twice. Then I signed it, with Harold old fountain pen, and I did not shake.
Todd called within an hour of receiving it. He was shouting. He called me ungrateful. He called me a bitter old woman. He said that I had always favored his sister, which was nonsense, since he had no sister. At the end he began to cry. He said, “Mom, I was in over my head. I owed money. I did not know how to ask.” I said, “Todd, I would have given you the shirt off my back if you had asked. You did not have to say I was sick. You only had to say you were afraid.”
He returned the money in six weeks, by selling the lake house at a loss. Jenna lost her job and her license. I did not attend the closing. Margaret Ellison, who had every right to be furious, drove to my house one evening and said she would not press charges against Jenna, provided that she apologize in person. Jenna did. She stood in my kitchen, in a plain gray sweater with no wine glass in her hand, and said she was sorry, and meant it, I think, for the first time in her life.
I used part of the money to take Margaret and Dr. Ferris on a river cruise on the Mississippi, in October, with a very good dinner every night. Dr. Ferris proved to be a wonderful dancer. And on the last evening, at the rail, with the lights of St. Louis glittering ahead, Margaret leaned against my shoulder and said, “You know what the best part is? Nobody parked us out by the weeds.” I laughed so hard that a waiter brought me a glass of water. I drove the Buick all the way home.