Part 3 — The Attic Footlocker
Arliss Ridgeway held the phone out so that I could see the screen and so that Tammy, who had gone gray under her makeup, could not look away. The photograph showed the inside of a battered Army footlocker with the lid thrown back. It was not full of jewelry or cash. It was full of folders, forty-three of them, each with the name of a neighbor written on the tab in a neat hand I recognized from birthday cards.
“Pearl Hatcher. Wilbur Dunn. The Alvarez family on Grand. Mrs. Odom.” I read the names aloud, and each one belonged to a person I had known for thirty years, people who had also lost their shingles to the hail of May the nineteenth. Inside each folder was a copy of an insurance check, a deposit slip, and a typed letter from something called Storm Relief Services. It said that the homeowner had signed over the handling of the claim, and it was signed Tammy Lowery, Coordinator.
It was a small business and an ugly one. After the storm, Tammy and Lance had gone from door to door on West Maple and the streets beyond it, offering to speak to the contractors for people who were too old or too tired to do it themselves. They collected the checks, deposited them in an account opened under a made-up name, and told each owner that the roofers were backed up until spring. Mine had been the first, and the plainest, because I was the mother of Tammy and the easiest door to knock on.
Arliss turned to the crowd. “I have been repairing the houses of this town since 1971,” he said, “and I will not have my name used to cover this.” He told the News 9 camera that Ridgeway had never heard of Storm Relief Services, and he asked the neighbors who were present, at least a dozen, to bring their folders to him.
A detective from the Enid police, who had been called by Arliss that morning and had been waiting in an unmarked car, walked up the driveway. He was polite and unhurried. He asked Tammy and Lance to come with him to the station to answer questions, and he asked the cameraman to please lower the lens once they were inside the car. Lance came out from behind the truck with his hands where everyone could see them.
The total, when the bank finished counting, was $212,640. The account holding it was frozen that afternoon. The white Lexus, bought with the check that carried my forged name, was seized and sold, and the sale paid for most of the neighbors who had been taken first. By Thanksgiving every one of the forty-three households had received its money back, in writing, with an apology from the bank for how long it had taken to notice.
Tammy pleaded guilty. She told the court she had begun with my check, in a panic over a debt of Lance, and that each additional door had been easier to open than the last. The judge, who had been a nurse before she became a judge, said she believed that. She sentenced Tammy to a term in the county facility, supervision afterward, and restitution for every dollar, and she sentenced Lance to a longer term because he had made the plan. My daughter wrote to me from there on lined paper, and I read the first letter standing in the hall, then sat down on the bottom stair.
The crew of Ridgeway arrived on Monday as promised. Twelve men and a woman named Dot who ran the nail gun like a conductor. They began with my house on West Maple and went on to the houses of Pearl Hatcher and Wilbur Dunn and the Alvarez family. Arliss said no one on the street would pay a cent for labor, and he wrote the amount off in front of me with a pencil on the back of his hand.
The blue tarp came down on the third day. I stood in the yard and watched the last bundle of shingles go up the ladder, and I thought of Clyde, who had bought the house in 1977 and never once let a leak go longer than a weekend. I carried the six buckets to the curb, one after another, and then I stood a long time holding the seventh, the little one, because it had been the first.
At the end of the week the company held its giveaway after all. This time it was held on my lawn, with the same cardboard check, which Arliss had kept, the name crossed out and written again in his own marker: Opal Hendrix. The News 9 camera was there, and the neighbors came with lawn chairs and a plate of the lemon bars of Pearl Hatcher. I did not cry on cue. I cried the ordinary way, when the weather is right.
A nurse learns that the person who says nothing is often the one who most needs listening to, and I wish I had listened to the buckets sooner. Then, because I am who I am, I opened my old nursing bag in the hall closet and sewed the torn lining shut again, with the original thread.
That night the rain came, a real Oklahoma rain, loud and long, from the west. I lay in my own bed with the lamp out and listened to it fall on new shingles, and not one drop came through. In the morning there were no buckets on the bedroom floor. Only the quiet, and the smell of fresh pine, and the sun on the side of the bed where Clyde used to sleep.