Mr Davis from the state treasurers office opened his briefcase next to the bourbon balls and said, Mr Hendricks, we would like to ask you about a withdrawal form dated March third. It has your wifes signature on it.
I set my hands in my lap, because I had never signed a withdrawal form in my life.
Twenty-two years keeping the books for the Methodist church teaches a woman what a real signature looks like and what a forged one looks like. Walt had emptied Tylers 529, fourteen years of birthday money and tax refunds and every dollar from the quilts I sold at the craft fair, and to do it he had signed my name on the form. He never imagined I would see it, because Walt leaves the money to me and always tells me so, and then takes it anyway.
What he did not know was the second set of books I kept in a spiral notebook in my sewing basket, where Walt has never looked, because Walt has never touched a needle in his life. Dates. Amounts. The day the 529 went to zero. And Tylers phone call, crying, two weeks before Christmas, because the University of Kentucky financial aid office said there was a problem with his account.
Walt told his brother I was finally easy to live with. He mistook quiet for beaten. They are not the same thing.
I was the one who called the state treasurers office. I gave them the notebook, the dates, and a sample of my real signature next to the forgery. Forging a spouses name to drain a childs college fund is not a household matter. It is a crime, and they came out on Christmas Eve because the case was that clean.
The eighteen Santa hats in my living room went very still. Walts brother stopped laughing.
The money was traced and restored to Tylers account, and Tyler starts at Kentucky in the fall. Walt is answering for the forgery. And I filed, with the notebook as the backbone of it, and a protective order for the phone he stepped on and the years before it.
I led the carols that night at the piano. Silent Night, O Holy Night, Away in a Manger. I sang every word. It turned out to be the last Christmas I ever cooked that ham, and I have never once missed it.