“I know exactly who it is, Gordon,” I said quietly. I pulled the glossy business card out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the white tablecloth beside his water glass. Brennan Brewing Investments, it read, in gold foil letters. Under the name, the name of my nephew Kyle, and a phone number, and an email address at a website I had never heard of. “I own a brewery. I own the only Brennan Brewing in this state. And I have never in my life had an investment arm.” Gordon, the father of my girlfriend Patricia, stared at the card as if it were a snake. The rest of the family had gone silent around the table.
Kyle, the son of my sister, thirty four years old, in a slim cut jacket that cost more than my first truck, did not look up. He studied his plate. A muscle moved in his jaw. “Uncle Dennis,” he said. “Let me explain.” I said, “Please do.” I had sat across that table from many young men in my life, in rooms with bad lighting and long speeches, and I knew the sound of a man looking for a door. “Gordon came to me, asking about opportunities,” Kyle said, slowly. “And I thought, the brewery has a great reputation. I thought I could use the name to help him get a return.”
“You took fifty thousand dollars from this man,” I said. “From a retired machinist in Vancouver, Washington, who keeps his savings in a credit union account and drives a ten year old Buick. You told him the money was going into expansion at my brewery. You wired it to an account in your own name, and you used it to pay off the lease on your Porsche.” I turned the card face down. “Gordon showed it to me at the Fourth of July picnic. He was so proud. He said, Dennis, your nephew is a real go getter.” My voice cracked. Patricia was staring at her father with her hand over her mouth.
A fake business card at a family dinner exposed a stolen retirement fund and gave a brewery owner a chance to rebuild his nephew.
Then I did what I had practiced on the drive over, and I took the last folder out of my jacket. I did not do it to humiliate Kyle. I did it for Gordon. “Gordon, I need you to hear this part,” I said. “I sold Brennan Brewing in March to a national distributor. Thirteen million, two hundred thousand dollars. I have not told my family. I have not told anyone but my lawyer, and Patricia, who figured it out on her own.” I turned to him. “The money I owe you is not for Kyle to repay. It is mine. I will write you a check tonight for the whole fifty thousand. I do not want you to lose one night of sleep.”
The face of Gordon worked. He was a proud man and he did not like to be rescued. “Dennis, I cannot take that,” he said. “It was my decision. I should have asked you.” I shook my head. “No. It was a family name, and it was used, and I am the one who let a boy grow up thinking it was a free ticket.” I took my checkbook out of my pocket. “Take it, Gordon. You are going to be my father in law someday if Patricia will have me. I would like to start with a clean ledger.” Patricia burst out laughing and crying at the same time. Gordon, finally, nodded.
I wrote the check, tore it off, and handed it across. Then I turned to my nephew. I will tell you, I have a temper. But I have also been sober since 1998, and sobriety teaches you something about the people you love. It teaches you that the worst thing you ever did is not the whole of you. “Kyle,” I said. “I was you once. Not a thief, but a boy with big talk and a bigger thirst. A man named Hal Dutton dragged me to a meeting in a church basement on Burnside, and he did not give up on me.”
“I am not going to give up on you,” I said. “But you are going to pay me back, with interest, and not with money. You are going to start at the bottom of my new company. I have a plan. I am opening a nonalcoholic brewery on the east side. Craft root beer, ginger beer, hop water, all of it, the kind of stuff a man like Hal could drink in peace.” Kyle lifted his head. His eyes were red. “You want me to work for you? After this?” I said, “I want you to learn to carry a keg. Starting Monday, at six in the morning. It is a good place to start being a man.”
He showed up. Pale and miserable, in work boots he had clearly never worn. I handed him a pair of rubber gloves and a mop. He cleaned the floor drains. He scrubbed the fermentation tanks. In the second month, his hands blistered and bled, and he stood at the sink with the water running pink, and I thought he would quit. Instead, he put on a fresh pair of gloves and went back to the tanks. In the third month, he started coming in early. In the fourth, he asked me how to read the gravity charts.
The money of Gordon was returned the same night, of course. Kyle repaid me over the next two years, from his paycheck, a little every month. When I handed him the receipt for the last installment, he looked at it for a very long time. Then he said, “Uncle Dennis, I want to apologize to Gordon. In person.” We drove to Vancouver on a Saturday afternoon. Kyle stood on the porch of Gordon with his hat in his hands and said everything he needed to say. Gordon listened. Then he put out his hand. Kyle shook it, and the old machinist said, “Come in. Patricia made a pie.”
We opened the nonalcoholic brewery in April. We called it Hal and Sons, after the man who pulled me out of a basement, and I hung his photograph on the wall by the door. Kyle runs the taproom. Last month, a young man came in on a Tuesday afternoon, twenty two years old, shaking, ten days sober, and he sat at the bar and ordered a ginger beer. Kyle poured it, and slid it across, and said, “First one is on the house, man.” I watched from the back, with a rag in my hand. Some debts get paid forward. That is the only kind worth collecting.