“…is your sister, Marlene,” Ms. Bell said, and the courtroom swam. I heard her say it, but my mind refused to take it in. Marlene. My baby sister, three years younger than I was, who had held my hand at our mother service and slept on my couch after my gallbladder surgery. Marlene, who sent me a card every birthday. I turned and looked at the back row of the gallery, where a woman in a green coat sat very still with her purse in her lap, and I saw her put her face in her hands. She did not even try to deny it.
Judge Halloran called a short recess and asked all parties to stay seated. In the silence I could hear the radiator ticking. Ms. Bell leaned toward me and said, in her low calm voice, “Sandra, I am so sorry. I found the LLC records three weeks ago, and I held back until I had the bank statements. I did not want to break your heart on a guess.” I took her hand under the table. It was warm and dry, and it was the only steady thing in that room. I told her she had done exactly the right thing. Then I asked what happened next.
What happened next took forty minutes, and I will remember every second. Marlene stood up in the gallery, walked to the front, and asked the judge if she could speak. She said she had been seeing Greg for eighteen months. She said he had promised to leave me anyway, that she had told herself it was a marriage already over. She said the boat was bought with money he moved from the car washes into the LLC, to keep it out of the divorce, and that her name was on the registration because he asked. “I am ashamed,” she said. “I will tell you everything.”
A gold watch catching the light, a photograph on the evidence table, and a sister in a green coat.
Greg said nothing. His lawyer had stopped whispering and was packing his briefcase, a man who has just realized the client has made him an accessory to perjury. Judge Halloran took off her glasses and set them on the bench. She said that in thirty one years on the bench she had seen men hide assets in many ways, but seldom with a photograph of themselves holding a beer on the evidence. She ordered a full forensic accounting of every business account, every LLC and every account in any name connected to Mr. Kovac, and she referred the sworn statement to the prosecutor for perjury.
The accountants took four months. They found what Ms. Bell had suspected: that over three years, Greg had been quietly draining the three car washes, moving six hundred and ten thousand dollars through the LLC into accounts in Sandusky and a bank in the Cayman Islands. The tax returns he had shown me were fiction. The car washes were not broke. They were thriving, and each earned more than I had made in my whole career. The boat was only the most visible part of the iceberg. I sat in Ms. Bell office, above the bakery, smelling cinnamon, and cried, and then I laughed.
The final ruling came in October. Judge Halloran awarded me half of everything, including the car washes, the Second Wind, the accounts, and two hundred and ten thousand dollars in back support. She added a penalty for Greg for hiding assets, and the judge made a point of looking at him when she read it. Greg wore no Rolex that morning. His lawyer had advised against it. He sat with his shoulders slumped, and when the judge said the word perjury, he flinched. Afterward he caught me in the hallway and said, in a small voice, “Sandy, I never wanted it to be like this.” I said, “Greg, you wanted it exactly like this.”
Marlene pleaded to a reduced charge and returned every dollar. She cooperated with the prosecutor and testified against Greg, and he took a plea of eighteen months, and a very large fine. I did not speak to my sister for a year. She sent letters, and I did not open them. At Christmas she left a small package on my porch, wrapped in plain brown paper. Inside was a photograph of the two of us at the beach in Lorain when we were nine and six, holding a bucket between us. On the back she had written: I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.
I sold the boat in the spring. Ms. Bell helped me find a buyer, a retired schoolteacher from Toledo who wanted to sail to the islands on weekends. I kept one thing from it, the small brass nameplate that read Second Wind, and it hangs now in my kitchen, above the window, beside a plant. I thought about it a lot that winter. A second wind is the thing that comes after you have already thought you were finished. I used part of the money to buy a small house on the lake in Vermilion, with a porch and a view of the water.
I hired Ms. Bell as my lawyer for life, and she refused to take another dime from me. Instead she accepted a standing invitation to dinner every Sunday. We sat on my new porch with a pitcher of lemonade and watched the sailboats go out. She told me about her late husband, a bus mechanic, and how she had started the practice above the bakery at fifty two, when everyone said she was too old. I told her about the switchboard, the thirty four years, and the day I stopped being afraid. She said, “That is the whole story, honey.”
In June, on a bright and windy Saturday, my sister came to the porch steps. She stood at the bottom with her hands at her sides, older, thinner, her green coat folded over her arm. She did not speak. I looked at her for a long time. Then I went down the steps, one at a time, and I held out my arms. We stood there for a long while, two women in their sixties, rocking in the wind. I did not forgive her all at once. But a second wind had come, and I let it carry us a little way.