Part 3 — The Commissions
I kept my boot on the projector cord and read the number from the bottom of the last page, one digit at a time, the way I had read the timbers overhead for thirty-eight years.
“Sixty-one thousand, four hundred dollars.”
The ballroom at the Holiday Inn was as silent as a mine after the fans shut off. Thirty retirees sat with their chicken salad going warm.
Warren Tacketts regional manager, a heavy man in a gray suit, stood up from the back table and walked down the aisle. He did not speak to Warren. He took the stack of confirmations out of my bucket, one page at a time, and read them standing.
“Mr. Gaddis,” he said at last, “I am so sorry. This should have been caught.”
Warren said something about market conditions, and his manager told him to be quiet.
For thirty-eight years I counted the timbers over my head, and it turned out the same habit could count a thief.
The man by the door, the one whose statement was down fourteen thousand two hundred dollars, came forward and handed over his papers. Then the schoolteacher. Then the woman with the cane. By the end of the afternoon, eleven people stood in a line at the managers table with their statements.
A lawyer from Charleston, Ms. Whitaker, took my call that evening. She had handled churning cases before. She explained that excessive trading to generate commissions breaks federal securities rules, and that the way back was through the industry arbitration forum, where the firm is required to answer for what its brokers do.
She filed my claim in November, along with the claims of the other ten. I sat in a hearing room in Charleston in my funeral suit and told three arbitrators about Mavis, and the air freshener, and the sentence safer than a church.
The panel took six weeks. They found that Warren had churned the accounts and had ignored every sign of our age and our need. They ordered the firm to repay my losses of one hundred twenty-two thousand seven hundred dollars, plus the commissions of sixty-one thousand four hundred, plus interest.
Warren was barred from the industry. The Lexus went back to the leasing company.
The check came on the first of March. I held it in the kitchen for a long time. Then I called the hospice that had sat with Mavis in September and I wrote them a check of my own.
That night I took down the lunch bucket, which was empty now of paper.
I unfolded one of the napkins, the last one she packed. The pencil was soft with age.
“Come home.”