“…and Gary said…” was where the tape stopped for a second, and I held my breath in my basement, with the old television flickering and Tyler sitting politely on the stairs. On the screen, my Walt looked up from his rocking chair, quite calm, as the screen door banged behind him. Gary stepped onto the porch, a big, hearty man in a golf shirt with a gold watch, carrying two cans of root beer. He said in a booming, cheerful voice, “Dad, who are you talking to? You need to rest. Kim says you have been talking to yourself.”
Walt did not blink. I will remember that for the rest of my life. He lifted the camera strap casually, and turned the lens toward the yard, and said, in an easy voice, “Just practicing my Easter toast, Gary. Marge likes me to say something.” Gary laughed. He set down the root beer. He said he would take the old camera inside, so it would not get wet. Walt said no, thank you, he liked to hold it. And Gary shrugged, and went back inside. The tape rolled on. In the silence, my husband breathed out slowly. He looked straight into the lens. He winked.
Then he leaned in close, and spoke very softly, the way he used to read me poems on the porch swing. “Marge, go see Ellen Pruitt. Ellen at the Terre Haute Savings and Trust. You taught her piano when she was six, and you never charged her mother a nickel because they were poor. She never forgot. She is a vice president now. I put everything in a trust at her bank, in your name alone. Three hundred and twelve thousand dollars. She has the papers. Gary never knew that you taught that girl. He does not know a thing about you, honey. I love you.”
A VHS tape in a hidden drawer under the seat, a man who winked at the camera, and the one person in town Gary would never think to ask.
The screen went to snow. I sat on the basement step stool and cried, in the dusty light, with the whole world gone quiet around me. Tyler, who was fifteen and shy, and who had never seen an old woman weep, held out a clean handkerchief from his back pocket. He said, “Mrs. Hensley, I am sorry. I should not have looked in the drawer.” I said, “Tyler, you did the best thing anyone has done for me in a year.” I blew my nose. I asked him if he would carry the rocker back to its place on the porch, and he did, gently, with both arms.
The next morning I put on my good gray suit and my pearl necklace and took a taxi to the Terre Haute Savings and Trust. Ellen Pruitt met me at her office door. She was fifty two, plump and kind, in a red blazer, and she embraced me before I could say a word. She said, “Mrs. Hensley, I have waited a year to see you. Walt made me promise not to call.” She opened a folder and laid out the papers. The trust. The account number. The signature of my husband, firm and clear. I wept again. Ellen handed me a tissue box without comment.
I have since learned what Gary was up to. He did owe money to men in Indianapolis, quite a lot, more than two hundred thousand dollars. He had been planning to move me into assisted living, take control of my accounts, and sell the house to settle his debts. When he logged into my online banking that week and found it nearly empty, thanks to Walt, he turned pale and called the bank in a panic. Ellen took the call herself. She said, in her gentle, firm way, “Mr. Schultz, I cannot discuss accounts with anyone but the account holder.”
Gary came to my house that evening. He did not bring root beer. He stood in my front room, in a wrinkled shirt, among the piano and the sheet music, and said that he had been desperate, that he had meant only to borrow, and that I should understand. I listened. I let him say all of it. Then I stood, walked to the front window, and pointed at the porch, where Walt rocker sat in the evening light. I said, “Gary, my husband made that chair so that every person who sat in it would be safe. You will not sit in it again.”
Kim learned the truth over the following weeks. She was brokenhearted, and furious, and then, slowly, resolved. She sat with me for two nights at the kitchen table, and we went through every account. She asked Gary to move out. He sold the used car lot to pay his debts, and took a job at a dealership in Evansville. He sends a small check each month. I accept it in the spirit in which it is sent. Kim says that some people grow only when the floor is taken away from them, and that she hopes he is one of them.
I changed all my passwords. Ellen helped me, with a cup of coffee and a notebook, and a great deal of patience. She also set up a small scholarship in Walt name for students at the Terre Haute vocational school, where he had taught shop for thirty years. I put the first check in myself. And on a warm Saturday in April, I did something I had not done since Walt passed. I opened the front room windows, sat down at the old upright, and rolled back the cover. Tyler was standing in the doorway, holding a battered music book.
He had asked, with great embarrassment, whether I might teach him. His mother could not afford lessons. I said that I had never charged a child who wanted to learn, and that I did not plan to start now. He sat beside me on the bench, on a stack of phone books, his hands too big and his shoulders too stiff. I showed him middle C. He pressed it. A clear, warm note rose through the front room, past the windows and the curtains and the porch, where my husband chair rocked softly in the spring breeze, and I could swear I heard it creak.