“…the name on the form was Mark Dolan,” Ray said, and he said it the way a man names a weather he has been dreading for twenty six years. I stood with my hand on the green steel door of the safe, looking down at the shoebox, at the yellow envelopes, at the check with its faded blue border. Mark Dolan. My son in law. Diane husband of nineteen years, the man who carved the turkey at Thanksgiving. In 1998, Ray said, he had been twenty four, a payroll clerk at the mill, newly engaged to my daughter, and very much in need of money.
Ray handed me the form. I put on my reading glasses. It was a one page paper, a Release and Beneficiary Designation, with the mill letterhead and my husband name typed across the top. Stanley J. Kowalczyk. The signature at the bottom was a decent copy of Stan hand, but it leaned the wrong way. It had never leaned that way in his life. Beneath it, on a line for witness, in a clerk neat print, was the name Mark Dolan. He had signed as a witness to a signature he had made himself.
Ray said that Stan had caught it within a week. A clerk in the benefits office had mentioned, in passing, that his buyout was already processed. Stan had walked to the payroll window and asked to see the paperwork. He had seen the form. He had seen who had signed. And instead of calling the police, he had gone home to our kitchen, sat at the table where Diane was drying dishes, and decided to say nothing. He had been afraid it would break her heart. So he had put the whole business in a shoebox.
A black lunch pail in the trash, six numbers on a yellowed note, and a green safe at the union hall.
Ray told me the rest, sitting heavily in a metal chair in the old back office with the Bears game murmuring on a radio. Stan had never cashed the check. He had never let it go. Every month for twenty six years he had come to the union hall to see the box was still there, and to play cards with Ray, and not once had he said a word about it. When he got sick, he gave Ray the combination, and made him promise to hand it to me, and to nobody else. Ray said, “He told me, Betty will know what to do.”
I sat there a long time with the shoebox on my lap. A great many things came clear. The way Mark had never once visited Stan at the hospital. The way he had kept offering, so smoothly, to help me with the paperwork, to look at the pension forms, to put his name on the accounts. The way Diane had been so anxious to clear the house. She had not known. I understood that now. She had been doing what she was told, by a man who feared what a lunch pail might hold.
The union attorney was a brisk woman named Patricia Howe, with silver hair and a stack of files. She read the form, the check, and Ray affidavit, and said that the mill had been bought out three times since 1998, but that the pension fund still existed, and that an unpaid buyout, with documented forgery, was precisely the kind of thing the fund had to honor. She said it could take a year. She said it would not be easy. She said, “Mrs. Kowalczyk, your husband was a remarkable man.” I said, “He was stubborn.” She said, “Same thing.”
That Sunday I invited Diane to supper. Just Diane, not Mark. I made pierogi, the way Stan liked, and set a candle on the table. After we had eaten, I put the shoebox in front of her and the form on top of it. I watched my daughter read. I watched her face. She went the color of paper. She read her husband name three times. Then she said, in a thin, wondering voice, “Mama, he told me Dad was confused. He told me to throw out the pail.”
She wept, and I held her, and the candle burned down. When she was calmer, she called her husband from my kitchen telephone. She did not shout. She asked him to meet her at the house. She asked him to bring the keys, the cards, and his cell phone. She said, very evenly, “Mark, I know about the form.” I could hear a silence at the other end of the line like a closed door. She hung up. And my daughter put her head on my shoulder, and said, “Mama, I am so ashamed.”
Mark Dolan moved out that week. He was never charged, since the statute had long run, but the mill pension board reviewed the case and awarded my husband estate the original buyout with the interest that had accrued. Six hundred and twelve thousand dollars. I used a portion of it to pay for Diane divorce, and a portion to endow a scholarship at the community college in Stan name, for children of steelworkers. The rest I put in a savings account and told no one, because that is how Stan would have done it, quietly, and without a word to anyone, and with a Hostess cupcake on the side.
On the first of May, Ray and I drove out to Marquette Park and sat on a bench by the lake, with a thermos of coffee and two bologna sandwiches. Ray had a Hostess cupcake in his pocket, his joke. The sun was shining. Gulls wheeled over the water. I took the old black lunch pail from the car, and set it on the bench between us, where Stan would have put it. Ray lifted his coffee cup. “To Stan,” he said. “To the best damn mill hand in Gary.” And I said amen.