I nodded to Gus, and I picked up the last page and held it high so the entire fellowship hall could see it. Two hundred people had stopped breathing. The two men in leather jackets by the coat rack had not moved. “This is a letter, signed and sealed, to the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Gaming Enforcement,” I said, in the voice I once used to call bowling league scores. “I delivered it in person last Tuesday. It lists the bookmaking operation in Pittsburgh that has been taking money from my son in law for six years, and it names the account where my husband pension went.” Karen made a small sound, like a cat.
The taller of the two men stepped forward and took a black wallet from his jacket. “Mrs. Kaminski, I am Detective Sergeant Paul Greco,” he said. “This is Trooper Mendez. We are not here for you.” He turned to Rick, who had grown the color of the tablecloth. “Mr. Richard Dolan, we have been investigating the Pittsburgh ring since August. Your name has been on their books for six years. Your wife told us last night that you had paid them off. That was not true. You owe them forty one thousand dollars, and you have been paying them with money that belongs to your mother in law.”
Karen turned to her husband with a face of such naked pain that I had to look away. “Rick, you told me it was over,” she said, in a whisper that carried to the back of the hall. “You swore on the grave of my father.” Rick opened his mouth, closed it, and sat down heavily on a folding chair, among the platters of golabki. The priest, Father Bartek, took a step toward the microphone, hesitated, and sank into a chair himself. Two hundred people in their best clothes sat motionless, forks poised over paper plates, and not a single one of them was eating. It was the quietest anniversary dinner in the history of the parish.
A kolaczki plate set beside a legal paper gave one widow the weekend to bring her daughter back to the pew in Erie.
I laid my terms on the table beside the kolaczki. The guardianship petition would be withdrawn by the end of the week. The second mortgage, signed by Karen as my guardian before she was one, would be voided by the bank, which had already been told. Rick would cooperate with the State Police in full, and he would enter a program for gambling in Pittsburgh, at a facility I had visited with Gus. Karen would move in with me for the winter, and she would see a counselor, and she would stop apologizing for what she had not done. And the fellowship hall would finish the dinner, because Father Bartek had blessed the food.
Rick put his face in his hands. He was fifty three years old and had once been the best driver on the UPS route in Erie, a big man with a booming laugh. Now he sagged in his chair like an old coat on a nail. “Dot, I am sorry,” he said, to the floor. “I did not mean to take the pension of Stan. I just wanted to get even once. Just once, and I would stop.” I crossed to him, past two hundred silent parishioners, and put my hand on his shoulder, where Stan used to clap him on the back. “Rick, the first step is to say the true thing out loud,” I told him. “You just did.”
Karen was weeping in the aisle between the tables. She came to me at last, in a blue dress with a ruined corsage, and she knelt on the polished floor, ignoring the stares. “Mama, I put the second mortgage on the house,” she said. “I signed it as your guardian. I thought if I could just hold on for a few more months, he would stop.” She gasped. “I was so afraid of losing him that I almost lost you.” I took her face in my hands. Her cheeks were wet and hot. “Karen Marie, you did not lose me,” I said. “I was standing right here. I have been standing here the whole time.”
Rick bolted. It was a sudden, instinctive thing, the move of a man who has been running from himself for years. He leaped from the chair, vaulted the end of the long table, and made for the side exit through the kitchen. He got as far as the swinging door. Gus, who is seventy three and had spent forty years lifting bowling pins, stepped into the door frame with his arms crossed over his chest and a wrench in his belt. Rick ran into him like a man hitting a wall. The trooper arrived a second later and took his arm. Nobody even gasped.
The money consequences were the sort that unwind slowly. The Pittsburgh ring was broken up by the state police over the winter, and twelve people were charged, from a bookmaker in the Strip District to a runner in Wheeling. Rick pleaded guilty to a lesser count and was sentenced to a program and probation. The pension of Stan was restored to my own account by order of the bank, with interest. The second mortgage was voided, and the guardianship petition dismissed. The six acres of lakefront, the lanes and the bowling alley, were sold for seven point seven million dollars, and not one cent of it was touched.
In the name of my husband, Stan, who passed in 2020 and who wore his union pin on his winter coat every day for forty years, I started the Lakeview Lanes Fund. It pays for treatment, legal help and counseling for older families in Erie and Crawford counties whose own relatives are caught in addiction and debt. In the first year, we helped thirty three households. A retired machinist of eighty one, in a Penn State cap, sat in the office with his wife, who held his hand. “We were too proud to ask,” he said. I told him that pride is a luxury, and that help is a gift.
In January, snow came off the lake in sheets, and the whole of Erie went quiet under it. On a Friday night, I sat in the front pew of the church with Karen beside me and Gus behind us, and a plate of kolaczki in my lap that Karen had baked herself. Rick came in late, thinner, in a plain jacket, and slid into the back row without a word. He had been home from the program for two weeks. After the service, he walked up the aisle with his cap in his hand. “Dot, may I have a kolaczek?” he asked. I handed him the plate. “Take two,” I said.