Danny told me the rest at my kitchen table at midnight, with the snow whispering against the window and the police scanner murmuring in the corner. “Dad, Kurt called me from his golf simulator,” he said. “He asked if you had said anything about the money. I said, what money? And he said, never mind.” He turned his cap in his hands. “Sheila called an hour later. She wanted to know if you had talked to a lawyer. They both knew, Dad. Doug has a cousin who works the register at the Casey on Highway 69.” I am Gene Halvorsen, seventy seven years old, and I looked at the Bible.
The cousin of Doug had seen me scratch the ticket and sit in the truck for twenty minutes. Iowa has a way of knowing. By Monday, he had told Doug, and Doug had told Sheila, and Sheila had told Kurt, and the three of them had decided that their father was an old man, newly rich, and in need of protection. The papers they were bringing in the morning, Danny said, were a power of attorney and a letter from a doctor in Omaha who had never met me. I sat for a long time in the kitchen light.
At nine the next morning the snow had stopped, and the driveway was white and blue under a clear sky. A black SUV pulled in behind the old Ranger of Danny, and Kurt got out in his good wool coat, followed by Sheila and Doug, all three carrying folders. I stood at the open door with my hand on the frame. Behind me in the kitchen, at the table, sat my son Danny with a cup of coffee, and beside him my old friends from the VFW, three men with snow shovels leaning on the wall, who had come to help clear the walk.
A five dollar scratch ticket kept in a Bible gave one retired snowplow driver the length of a snowstorm to bring his grown children back to the truth in Ankeny.
I gave my terms at the head of the table, with the Bible in front of me. “Children, sit. There is no sickness. There was never any sickness. I told that story to find out who I had raised, and I know. Here is what I am going to do. Two hundred thousand dollars to each of you, now. The rest goes into a trust in the name of your mother, and Danny will help me run it. You will tear up your papers in front of me. And I will not be hearing a word about my doctor again.”
Kurt dropped into a chair and rubbed his face with a hand that was not as steady as it had been in the driveway. “Dad, I am four payments behind on the boat,” he said. “And two on the lake house. I told myself we were only making sure that you were protected.” Sheila looked at her hands. “Doug lost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars on crypto last year,” she said, “and I kept telling him it would come back.” Doug, at the end of the table, stared at the wood. “I am sorry, Gene,” he said hoarsely. “I am just so tired of being scared.”
But the old habit of grabbing is hard to lose. Kurt suddenly reached across the table, snatched the Bible with the ticket and the trust papers inside it, and ran for the front door with the book clutched to his coat, meaning to take it to a lawyer in his car. He got as far as the porch. The three men from the VFW, in their caps, stepped out of the kitchen and across the doorway with their snow shovels crossed like a rail. Danny came up behind. And my police scanner crackled in the quiet.
Kurt stopped on the porch in the blinding white light of the winter morning, with the Bible in both fists and the whole yard sparkling with ice, three old men in front of him and snow up to the steps. Old Walt, who had cheated at cards beside me for twenty years, spoke in his dry rasp. “Kurt, that book has been in the family of your mother for four generations. It has never been run off with.” Kurt looked at the cover. His eyes filled. He turned around and walked back inside and set it on the table.
The consequences were warm, though a little cold on the edges. Kurt and Sheila each took their two hundred thousand dollars, and they tore up their papers in front of me, and Doug went to a counselor. The trust was set up with the lawyer in West Des Moines. Danny took a job as the manager of a tire shop in Ankeny, with a raise that I paid out of his own work. He moved into my guest room for the winter, and he cooked every night, badly, and I ate every bite.
In the name of my wife Marlys, who passed in 2021, I started the Marlys Halvorsen Fund. It pays for winter heating bills and roadside emergency kits for seniors and for recovery programs for people with injuries and addictions, in Polk, Story and Dallas counties. In the first year we paid four hundred and six heating bills and entered thirty one people in recovery programs. One was a forty year old roofer from Boone who had hurt his back and lost everything to the pills, and who walked out of treatment on a snowy morning and called his mother.
On the second Friday in October, a year later, I pulled up to the Casey on Highway 69 in my truck with Danny in the passenger seat, and we walked in together. I bought one five dollar scratch ticket, and he bought one too. We stood in the parking lot, heater running, and scratched them with our thumbnails, shoulder to shoulder, while the light faded in the west. Mine was a loser. His was a loser. We looked at each other, and we burst out laughing so hard that a woman at the pump stared.