“Lorraine,” said the voice on the telephone, “before you say another word, tell me if he is in the house.” It was Marlene Voss, my shift partner from the dispatch center for twenty years, who had retired the same spring I did and now taught a defensive driving class on Tuesdays. I stood in the kitchen at seven in the morning with the cord wrapped around my wrist and my son sleeping upstairs, and I said, very low, that he had gone out at six. “Good,” said Marlene. “Then listen. I have been reading the paper. A bookie named Sal Ferrante was arrested in Omaha last week. Federal. And they are looking for every name in his book.”
I had not known that. I had heard the name of Sal only the afternoon before, through a gap in a bathroom window, while my feet soaked in Epsom salts. Marlene said, “Did you tell anyone what you heard?” I said she was the first person. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I called Sheriff Dunning at five thirty. He has known you for thirty years. He is coming to the house at nine, quietly, in his own car, and so is the man from the federal office. Do not let Curt see anything unusual.” I said I had been a dispatcher for twenty seven years. Unusual was my specialty.
They came at nine, when Curt was at the gas station buying cigarettes, and they sat at my kitchen table with their hats on their knees: the sheriff, a big gentle man with a mustache, and a thin young agent named Park from the federal building in Omaha. I showed them the ladder from the garage. The sheriff ran his thumb along the silver painted cut below the seventh rung, and he whistled softly. Agent Park photographed it from six angles. “Mrs. Hatley,” she said, “this is attempted homicide. But I need him to say it, in his own voice, to someone besides you.”
A mother who spent a lifetime listening for emergencies can hear her own son planning one, and still choose to answer the call.
The plan came together over a pot of coffee. Labor Day was five days away. Curt believed I would be climbing that ladder on Monday morning to clean the gutters, as I had for forty years. We would let him believe it. A tall deputy would take the place of the ladder, a fiberglass one, secured by two men in the hedge. A microphone, small as a coat button, would be sewn into my gardening apron. And Agent Park would contact Sal, in jail, and offer him a deal for a recorded call. If he said what I thought he would, the rest would take care of itself.
I will not pretend I slept that weekend. I made a meatloaf on Saturday and watched my son eat three helpings, grinning, talking about football. I remember thinking that I had loved that boy since the second he was placed in my arms, and that no matter what the next three days brought, nothing could alter that. On Sunday, he asked me if I planned to do the gutters. I said, “First thing in the morning, honey.” He smiled at his plate. “Be careful, Mom,” he said. “That old ladder.” I did not look up. I buttered my roll.
On Monday morning, at eight, I came out to the garage in my apron and my gardening hat. Curt was sitting on the back porch steps with his coffee, and I could feel his eyes on me. I carried the sawed ladder out into the yard with a great show of effort, and I leaned it against the eave. And then I stopped. I put my hands on my hips. I said, in a clear voice, “Curt, honey, I do not like the look of this thing. There is a cut in the side.” I turned to look at him. He had gone the color of paper. The coffee cup was shaking in his hand.
“Mom,” he said. “Mom, listen.” I said I was listening. He stood up, and I saw his whole face working, the face of my baby, the face of the boy I had taught to tie his shoes. He said, “I did not want to. Sal said he would hurt the kids. I do not have kids, but he said he would hurt Jenny, and she is the only good thing I ever had.” His voice cracked. “I owed him forty thousand dollars. I could not stop. I could not stop, Mom, and I thought if you were gone, it would all just stop.”
The sheriff stepped out of the hedge. So did Agent Park. They were gentle. They read him his rights in the soft way they had practiced. Curt did not run. He sat back down on the steps and put his head between his knees and sobbed, huge loud choking sobs, like a child. I walked across the lawn in my apron and my hat, and I sat down beside him on the step, and I put my arm around his shoulders. I said, “I love you, Curtis. I am not letting go of you. But you are going to answer for this.” He said, “I know.”
Sal pleaded guilty to racketeering a month later, on the strength of the call that Agent Park had recorded, in which he threatened Curt in language that left no doubt. Curt was charged, too, but the judge listened to the tape and to the recommendation of a mother in a church hat, and the court sentenced him to residential treatment, then five years of supervised probation. He served eighteen months in a program in Lincoln. I drove there every second Sunday. He learned to cook in the kitchen, and he learned that he had an illness that was not a sin.
He came home last August, thinner, and bought a used pickup, and took a job with the county road crew. He pays me back a hundred dollars a month, for the attorney, and I put every dollar in a coffee can. On Labor Day, he came to the house at seven in the morning, before I was out of my robe, with a truck full of extension equipment. He would not let me touch a ladder. He cleaned all the gutters himself, humming. Afterward I handed him a glass of lemonade on the porch. He held it in both hands. He said, “Thanks, Mom.” And I knew exactly what he meant.