Denise had the paper in her hands, and she read line ten out loud before her husband could stop her. “March the third, twenty twenty three. Nineteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Marcy Dunn, Springfield.” The backyard went so quiet that I could hear the charcoal ticking in the grill. I am Walter Grimsley, seventy nine years old, standing in the sunshine on the Fourth of July in a clean shirt I had ironed myself, and I watched my son in law Curtis go the color of a boiled shrimp. “Who is Marcy Dunn?” said my daughter, in a small voice.
Marcy Dunn was a widow of seventy six, who lived in a small apartment in Springfield and had kept her late husband life insurance for eleven years. Curtis had collected her premiums from her door, month after month, in cash, and had kept them. The policy had lapsed in 2018, and he had never told her. Her husband had worked beside me at the plant for thirty years. When she called me last winter in tears, because the company had refused her claim for the final medical bills of her sister, I spent three weeks learning what had happened to her money.
I did not tell Denise any of this at once. I let the paper speak. Line ten was the first in a column of six, each one a date and a sum and a name, nine thousand dollars here, twelve thousand there, widows and retirees across four counties. Total, sixty eight thousand, four hundred dollars. Curtis had stood up every Fourth of July for eleven years and read to my family a list of who was pulling their weight. He had never once read the list that mattered. I had only copied it down.
A yellow legal pad read aloud at a family cookout gave one old machinist the afternoon to bring his son in law back to the truth in Joplin.
I gave my terms from the head of the picnic table, in a quiet voice. “Curtis, I do not want to see you in handcuffs in front of my grandchildren. On Monday morning you will drive to Springfield with me and sit in Marcy kitchen and tell her to her face. You will repay every name on that list, with interest, out of your own pocket. You will report yourself to the state insurance department before the end of the week. If you do all that, the list goes into my drawer. If you do not, it goes to the department, and I will not be the one to stop it.”
Curtis did not answer. His face worked. Denise had not moved, the paper still trembling in her hand, and tears were running down her cheeks. “Dad,” she said, “I laughed. Every year I laughed. When he read your name at the bottom, I laughed, and I told myself it was only a joke.” She turned to me. “I am so ashamed.” I told her that she had married a man who talked fast, and that no one in the history of the world had ever been punished for loving the wrong salesman. I opened my arms, and she walked into them.
It was then that Curtis broke. He lunged across the grass, tore the folded paper from the fingers of his wife, and ran for the side gate with it clutched in his fist. He had gone ten feet when a shadow rose from the lawn chair beside the cooler. Big Earl Tolliver, my cousin, two hundred and sixty pounds of retired welder, with a pair of barbecue tongs in his right hand and a plate of ribs in his left, stepped into the path. He did not say anything. He simply stood there, chewing, and held out the tongs, the way a man holds out a hand for a wallet.
Curtis stopped so fast that he slid in the grass. Big Earl took the paper out of his fingers with the tongs, as delicately as a cook turning a steak. Then he walked across the lawn, handed it to me, and went back to his chair. Everyone in the yard, thirty of my own family, let their breath out together. Curtis sank onto the cooler and put his head in his hands. “Walt,” he said, hoarsely, “I took the money to cover my losses on the football app. I meant to put it back. I swear on my children I meant to put it back.”
The money consequences were swift and fair. On Monday I drove Curtis to Springfield, and he sat in the kitchen of Marcy Dunn and wept, and she, being the kindest woman I know, patted his hand. He repaid the sixty eight thousand, four hundred dollars within the month, borrowing against his truck, and he filed his own report with the department, which suspended his license for two years. The two million, eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the patent I put in a trust for my grandchildren. I kept the old Ranger. It runs fine.
In the name of my wife Lorna, who passed in 2019, I started the Lorna Grimsley Fund. It pays for machinist apprenticeships, fraud protection for widows and gambling counseling for families, in Jasper, Newton and Barton counties. In the first year we placed twenty two apprentices at plants along old Route 66 and recovered ninety four thousand dollars for victims of premium theft. One was a retired seamstress from Carthage who had paid a man for a policy that did not exist. When the fund repaid her, she baked the whole staff a pie.
This Fourth of July, the family gathered at my house outside Joplin, and when the burgers were done and before the fireworks, I stood up with a yellow legal pad. Curtis, six months in the Wednesday meeting, sat at the end of the table with his hat in his lap. “Okay, family,” I said. “Annual report.” I read the name of every child and grandchild, and what each had done that was good. At the bottom I read one more. “Curtis. Still here. God bless him.” The whole yard cheered, and he laughed until he cried.