I read the letter of Mrs. Kessler to Angela standing at the desk of Denise, in the same cramped handwriting I remembered from the cash envelope in 1991. “Dear Angela, the trunk belonged to the first wife of my husband, Hildegard, who left it to the child she bore before the war and could not keep. That child was taken in by a family in Zanesville. I have searched for thirty years. A man at the county adoption office has told me that the boy was born in 1975, not 1945, and that he is the grandson, and that the family of the child is yours. Your son Michael is the heir.” I put down the page. I had to sit on the edge of the filing cabinet of Denise.
Michael was not my blood son. I had not said so aloud in thirty four years. Angela and I had brought him home from a Columbus hospital in October of 1975, when he was four days old, with a note from the agency and nothing else, and we had loved him ever since. We never told him because we were afraid of what the telling might do. Then, in 1991, a frail old woman had asked us to cut a trunk out of her crawl space, and we found inside the bearer bonds of Hildegard, gold certificates, and a trust deed, worth more than our house, which by right belonged to our boy.
We should have told Michael at once. I know that now. But Mrs. Kessler begged us to wait, because her own daughter Karen Kessler, who was twenty years old then, had given birth to a baby and given him up under pressure, and she did not want the girl to learn what she had done. Angela said we should keep it safe until Michael turned twenty one. Then Mrs. Kessler passed in 1993, and Michael went off to college, and the trunk sat in a banker box in my shop, sealed, with the key taped to the lid, because neither of us could bear to open the story.
Frank Mazzola has fixed more leaks in more basements than any other man in Franklin County.
I put on my hat and called my son, and then I did what I should have done thirty four years earlier. I asked him to meet me at the shop. He came in forty minutes, in his suit, with Brittany behind him in her white coat, and a woman of about fifty five in a camel jacket whom I recognized at once, from the way she tilted her head, as Karen Kessler Doyle. She looked at me and then at the box. “Mr. Mazzola,” she said, “I know I have no right. But I have been looking for my son since 1975.”
The room fell silent. Michael did not understand. He looked from the woman to me. “Dad, what is going on?” I took off my hat and held it against my chest. “Mike, I am going to tell you something, and I want you to know that I have loved you every day of your life.” I told him all of it. The hospital. The note. The trunk. Karen sat in a folding chair with her face in her hands, and Brittany stared at the floor, and Michael stood very still with his jaw tight, a boy of fifty with the face of sixteen.
He asked her, finally, in a voice I did not know, “Are you my mother?” Karen nodded. She had been nineteen, a girl from Grandview, and her parents had said that she could not keep him. She had signed the papers in a hospital room and never stopped looking. When she saw the news of my sale in the Columbus Dispatch, she had called Brittany, whom she knew from a charity luncheon, and told her the truth. Brittany had been the one to say, Let us go to Frank, and he would help. But Michael, hearing half the story, had assumed that I was hiding the money, and had phoned the shop for the records.
My son turned to me with tears in his eyes. “Dad, I thought you were going to cheat me,” he said. “I am so ashamed.” I told him it was my fault, that I had waited too long, and that a man who hides a thing for thirty four years has only himself to blame. Brittany stepped forward and took my hand. “Mr. Mazzola, Dad, the plunger,” she said, and could not finish. I said it was the funniest gift I had received in years, and that I had put it on my workshop wall. Brittany burst into tears.
We opened the trunk together on the shop floor, the four of us. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a leather case of bonds from the 1940s, a bundle of Austrian gold coins, and a deed to forty acres in Licking County. A certified appraiser in Columbus later put the value at one million, one hundred thousand dollars. Every dollar belonged to Michael, and he wanted to split it three ways. Karen refused. He insisted on putting a third of it in a college fund for his sons. A third he gave to St. Agatha, in the name of Angela. The last he put into the business of his mother.
At Christmas, I told them about the sale, and the check, and the four point four million. I divided half of it equally among my children and grandchildren.
Michael and Karen drive to the cemetery together every second Sunday, to visit Angela, and Karen leaves a single white rose. The plunger hangs on my workshop wall beside the tools of my father, with its red bow, a little faded, and a coil of copper pipe hangs beside it for luck. When Brittany visits, she takes it down and holds it up like a scepter, and we laugh until the pipes shake. After all, a plumber never shows what is behind the wall, until it is time.