Part 3 — The Hospital Badge
The face in the photograph belonged to Tasha. I read the name on the badge before I could stop myself: Natasha Reed, Unit Clerk, Labor and Delivery. She had worked under me for six years, on the night shift, with a baby on her hip in the break room when the sitter failed. She was the mother of my grandson. She was the one who sat in my kitchen on Sundays and told me gently that I was forgetting things.
The window was very quiet. Investigator Haddix let it stay that way. At last I said, “Tasha, why?” She was not there, of course, but I said it anyway, to the photograph, in the voice I used to use with a new mother who had just been told to push. “She is down the hall, Mrs. Barlow,” the investigator said. “She came in on her own at nine this morning, before you arrived. She asked to speak to you.”
Tasha came through the side door with a deputy a pace behind her. She was in her scrubs. She did not look at Dusty. She walked straight to me and said, with a catch in her voice that I had heard on a thousand deliveries, “Mrs. Barlow, I have been so ashamed. Dusty told me you had agreed. He said that your memory was going and that it was easier to hide the money until the guardianship. I fed the machine because he said it would be safe in a wallet he controlled. Then I read the statements and understood. I came this morning to say it.”
Dusty exploded at that. He called her names I will not repeat, and the deputy at the door took one step forward. Investigator Haddix said, mildly, “Mr. Barlow, if you speak to the witness in that manner again, we will continue this conversation at the county jail.” My son subsided, panting, his face going from red to gray. It was strange to see him that way. In his eyes I saw the six-year-old who had once lied to me about a broken window and then hid in the closet.
Haddix explained what the state would do. The ticket would be held by the Lottery Commission for the court, because it had been bought with stolen funds, and the prize of $86,000 would be paid not to the purchaser but to a court-supervised account. From that account the court would take, first, the restitution due to me, then the child support owed by Dusty, $41,000, to the mother of his son, which meant Tasha. Everything that remained would go into a trust for the boy.
Dusty had spent a lifetime avoiding the child support, and he looked at the investigator as if the man had pulled the rug out from under him. He said, “That is not fair.” The investigator said, “I think you will find it is the fairest thing that has happened to you in a long time.” A woman in the line behind us said, a little too loudly, “Amen.” The room, very quietly, agreed.
The Morgan dollars were the next piece to fall. Tasha gave the name of a dealer in Wheeling, an honest man named Mr. Kessler, who had bought the 212 pieces in three lots for a fraction of their worth, and who had suspected, on the second visit, that something was wrong. He had not resold a single one. They were in his safe, each in its blue Whitman folder, dates and mint marks intact. The investigator drove me there himself. The 1893-S was in the first folder, and I wept.
The cases moved quickly. Dusty was charged with theft, identity theft, fraud in a claim of lottery prize, and the attempt to obtain control of my affairs by false representations. He pleaded guilty in the winter and was sentenced to a term in prison with supervision afterward. The judge, who was a grandmother, said that a man who lies about his own mother to get her money has taken from her something no court can return, and that she would do what she could. She did, and it was a great deal.
Tasha pleaded to a lesser charge and received probation with community service, and she lost her position at the hospital, which was a hard thing because she was good at it. She repaid what she had put into the machine, one payment at a time, and she came to my kitchen every Sunday with the boy. I did not turn her away. The boy was in the kitchen too, and he had never done anything wrong in his life. It was he who put the table in order when his mother and I could not look at each other.
I went back to Wheeling Hospital one afternoon in the spring to visit the floor. The new charge nurse showed me the delivery rooms and the new monitors, and I held a newborn for ten minutes, a tiny girl with a cap of black hair and a grip like a mill hand. She yawned, and I felt the whole of the year slide off my shoulders. Thirty-five years of nights, and I had never once been bored.
A good nurse learns that a face in a crowd can hide the worst thing and the best thing, sometimes in the same breath, and the work is to wait for the breath. I wrote that on the back of a recipe card and tucked it in the lining of my old nursing bag, with the bank statements, under the stethoscope.
The blue folders are back in the gun safe that belonged to Clyde, in the order he kept them. On Sundays after supper I sit beside my grandson on the sofa and we open them together, one at a time, and I tell him which year the dollar was minted and why his great-grandfather loved it. He holds the 1893-S in both hands. “It is heavy,” he says. “It is supposed to be,” I tell him. “Some things are meant to weigh something.”