The name under the pencil scratches was Mike Dorsey. I read it three times at my kitchen table, with the brass key in one hand and the telephone in the other, and Sherry still talking in my ear. Mike Dorsey had been the treasurer of Local 1157 at the steel plant. He had bowled with the Pin Pals for two seasons before moving to Florida, or so everybody said. He had helped carry my husband on one side, in a rented black suit, and he had cried harder than I did. I had hugged him at the church and thanked him for being such a good friend to Gus.
“Joanne, honey, are you there?” Sherry asked. I said I was. She said the man with the gray ponytail was named Mike, he was staying at the motel on Pearl Road, and he had asked her whether the ball had a plug in the thumb hole. “I told him I did not know what he meant. I do not like him, Jo. He had a look.” I thanked her. I took the bowling ball back out of its bag, set it on a dish towel on the counter, and I made a decision. In the morning I would go to Parma Savings with the key of my husband, and I would not go alone.
I called my neighbor, Frank Kowalski, a retired police sergeant who lives across the street with a big dog and a bad hip. He came over in his slippers, listened to the whole story, and said, “Joanne, we will go at nine. Bring the ball.” At nine the next morning, we walked into Parma Savings, a plain old bank with a blue carpet, and asked for box 214. The clerk, a young woman named Beth, checked the card. “Only Joanne Petrakis,” she read. “Mr. Petrakis wrote that in 1989 himself.” She led us down a hallway to the vault, and I felt my knees go loose.
A widow finds out whose name her husband scratched off a 1989 score sheet, and what he paid for thirty years to keep it quiet.
Inside the box lay three green ledgers, a bundle of canceled checks, and a letter in the square printing of Gus. I sat in the little viewing room with Frank standing by the door and I read it slowly. Jo, if you are here, then Mike has come looking, and I am gone. In 1989 Mike took one hundred and forty eight thousand dollars from the pension fund of the union to cover his gambling. I found the books. I could have gone to the police. He begged me not to. He had three kids and a wife with a bad heart. So I made a deal. I would keep the records and say nothing, and he would never touch another cent.
The letter went on. But Mike did not pay it back, Jo. He ran to Florida. And the fund was short, and four hundred retirees would have lost part of their checks, men I worked beside for thirty years. So I paid it myself. Every month, from my own pay, in cash orders to the fund, marked anonymous. It took until 2019. The canceled receipts were there in the bundle, thirty years of them, each stamped by the clerk at the union hall. Gus had paid back one hundred and forty eight thousand dollars out of a steel worker wage, and had never said a word to me. I remembered the year we skipped the trip to Myrtle Beach. I remembered the old truck. I remembered thinking he was cheap.
I cried in that little room until Frank brought me a paper cup of water. Then I wiped my face and asked him what Mike wanted. Frank had worked fraud for eleven years. “He wants the ledgers, Joanne. Mike is coming back to run for the county council, and he is going to be on television. Those books are the only proof. If he gets them, the whole story disappears and so does the pension fund evidence.” I looked at the three green books. “Frank, I want him to hear it from me. I want it to be Thursday night, at Ridge Lanes.”
Thursday night, I walked into Ridge Lanes at seven with the bag in my hand and the ball of my husband inside it. The Pin Pals were all there, the four who were left, in their old shirts, because Sherry had called every one of them. Mike came in at ten past, with Tyler behind him, in a good sports coat and a smile. He saw the bag and the smile slid. I set the ball on the ball return of lane nine. I said, “Mike, Gus left you something.” I laid the first ledger on the scoring table, open to the first page.
Mike said it was old news. He said Gus had exaggerated. Then Walt Brzezinski, who had been on the Pin Pals for forty years and who was eighty four, pushed himself up on his cane and said, “I got an extra pension check that came in the mail in 2019, Mike. A letter said somebody paid back the shortage. Who did that?” I held up the canceled receipts. I said, “My husband did.” The whole bowling alley went quiet except for the sound of one ball rolling down lane four. Mike looked at the faces of the men he had known for decades, and for the first time I saw him look old.
He confessed right there. It took twelve minutes. Tyler stepped away from him as if he were hot. Frank stood quietly by the door with a hand on his phone, and the president of the union, who had been sitting at the bar, came over and shook my hand. Mike withdrew from the county race the next morning. He paid back every cent to the estate of my husband, and I asked that the check go to the retirees fund instead. Walt cried. The pension board hung a small brass plaque at the union hall with the name of Gus on it, and nothing else.
On the first Thursday of November, I carried the black Brunswick into Ridge Lanes myself. Sherry cheered. My son Nick came up from Columbus, in a plain flannel shirt, and stood behind me on lane nine with his hands in his pockets. I bowled a gutter ball, then another. The Pin Pals did not laugh. Walt told me to keep my wrist straight. The third ball curved all the way down the lane, slow and golden, and took out every pin but one. Nick put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Mom, I was wrong about the junk.”