One word, in capital letters, circled twice in red. DEXAMETHASONE. Below it, a number, and next to the number, a note in the tidy slanted hand of Dr. Patel. Supratherapeutic. Approximately forty times the dose prescribed. I stared at the page until the letters swam. “It is a steroid,” Mr. Sobczak said quietly. “In small doses, it eases the pain of an arthritic knee. In large doses, given too often, it destroys the liver, thins the bones, and strips the muscle off a man until he cannot stand. Your father was given it every two weeks for two years.” Karen put her hand over her mouth, and in the silence I heard Denise breathing.
She had not moved. Her hands lay flat on the table, perfectly steady, and her face wore the faint, polite expression of a woman waiting for a bus. “Ray was a stubborn man,” she said at last. “He insisted on those injections. I only did what he asked.” “Mrs. Kowalski,” said Mr. Sobczak, “the vial in the refrigerator was filled from a bulk supply that went missing from the office of Dr. Patel in 2021. You were a medical assistant there until you married my client.” He opened his folder and laid a second sheet on the table. “The clinic filed a report. The inventory records match. Your brother, Rick, has also been seen selling vials, in parking lots.”
Rick went white as paper. He took one step toward the door, and the door opened before he got there. A heavyset man in a brown sport coat stood in the frame, with a badge on his belt, and behind him a young uniformed officer. “Detective Novak, Erie Police,” the man said. “Mr. Sobczak called me this morning. Mr. Rick Dunning, Mrs. Denise Kowalski, I would like you both to come downtown and answer some questions.” Denise turned her head, quite slowly, and looked at me. For a moment I saw something under the polish, a flicker of ancient resentment, like a coal under ash. “He never even liked you, Tommy,” she said. “He told me so himself.”
Six recorded doctor appointments and a single circled word in red pen told a family what had really happened to their father.
I did not answer her. I could not. The detective led them out, Rick first, stumbling, and Denise after him with her head high and her purse over her arm, and I will never forget the click of her heels along the corridor. Mr. Sobczak closed the door softly and sat down across from Karen and me. He did not say anything for a while. Then he pushed the recorder across the table. “There are three more,” he said. “Your father asked me to play them for you, alone, after the rest had gone. I think you will want to hear them.”
The fourth appointment was only a minute long. Dr. Patel could be heard saying that the lab results would be back in a week. My father said, “Doc, if I do not make it, tell my kids that I knew.” The fifth was the sound of a man in a waiting room, humming a tune I recognized, the old Polish lullaby he used to sing to us in the dark. The sixth recording ran nine minutes. It was my father alone in his truck, in the parking lot of the clinic, speaking to the machine in a worn, gentle voice. He began, “Tommy, Karen,” and my sister put her face in her hands.
“I am sorry I did not see it sooner,” my father said. “She was good to me at first. I think she was lonely too. Do not be too hard on her, and do not be too soft. Let the law do its work.” A pause. A cough. “I want you two to have the house and the boxing gloves. Karen, I left the ring of your mother with Mr. Sobczak. Tommy, there is a letter in the coffee can in the garage. Read it when you are ready.” Another pause. “I boxed in the Navy, you know. Welterweight. I never lost a fight I was afraid of. I was afraid of this one, and I lost it. Do not make my mistake. Say what you fear.”
Denise and Rick were charged in March. The office of the attorney general of the state took the case and combined it with a diversion ring that had been moving steroids through three counties. Rick pleaded guilty to trafficking and received nine years. Denise, who had signed a prenuptial agreement in 2019, which she had never read closely, pleaded to felony elder abuse and manslaughter, and a judge in Erie County sentenced her to fourteen. She received not one cent from the estate. I sat in the second row at both hearings, beside my sister, and I did not look at her once.
I found the coffee can in the garage on a Saturday in April, behind the lawnmower. Inside was a folded sheet of yellow paper, and on it, in the blocky capitals of my father, a single paragraph. Tommy, I was proud of you every day. I was too proud to say it out loud. Do the push ups. Call your sister. Eat breakfast. I read it standing in the dim garage, with the smell of oil and cut grass, and I understood that I had spent fifty eight years waiting for my father to say a thing that he had already written down.
We kept the house on Peach Street. Karen and I take turns coming up on the weekends, and her grandkids run through the rooms, and the basement, which Rick left in a terrible state, has been scrubbed and painted white. In the closet I found the boxing gloves of my father, cracked red leather, tied together by the laces. I hung them on a nail beside the door. Every time I walk through it, I touch them, lightly, like a man touching a mezuzah. Some mornings I even try the push ups.
Last month at the Erie Navy club, the old fellows held a small tribute to my father. A man named Walt, ninety years old, stood up and told a story about the night that Ray Kowalski knocked out the base champion in the fourth round. Everybody laughed. And then Walt raised a paper cup and said, “To Ray. He never lost a fight he was afraid of.” I stood up with the rest and drank. I looked at the ceiling and thought of the sixth recording. I said, silently, I heard you, Dad. And I will say what I fear.