“…belongs to your mama, Loretta,” Mr. Freeman said, and his voice carried through the silent lobby, “and she has been sitting out there in that blue Buick for forty minutes with the motor running.” Every head turned toward the glass doors. In the parking lot, behind a row of sagging crape myrtles, a long blue sedan sat idling with its windows up. A woman in dark glasses and a church hat was visible behind the wheel, gripping it with both hands. Kevin made a small noise in his throat. I kept my hand on the button under my counter and my eyes on his face.
Mr. Freeman lowered himself carefully onto the bench by the pens. He was eighty seven and moved like a man made of old hinges, but his eyes were clear as water. “Miss Rhonda,” he said, “I owe you an apology. I should have told you more on Friday. But I did not want to put you in danger. My late wife Gloria had a younger sister. Loretta. When Gloria passed, Loretta moved in to help me with the house. She started helping with my bills. Then my mail. Then she started telling people she was my wife.” He sighed. “She is a tired and frightened woman, Miss Rhonda. But she is not a good one.”
Kevin stood frozen at my window, his smile gone, his hands flat on the counter. The security guard, a slow, gentle man named Mr. Pratt, had appeared beside him without a sound. I looked at the withdrawal slip under my counter. The signature looked right, I thought again. It looked exactly right, because someone who had watched Mr. Freeman sign his checks for years had practiced it a thousand times. I picked up the telephone and called the branch manager, who was just returning from lunch. His voice on the line was brisk. Then it was not brisk at all.
A bank window, a withdrawal slip, and an old man in the back of the line with two coffees.
The police arrived in six minutes. Two uniformed officers took Kevin gently by the elbows and walked him to a quiet office, while a third went out into the lot toward the blue Buick. I watched through the window as he tapped on the glass. The woman lowered it an inch. They spoke for a moment. Then the engine turned off, and the door opened, and Loretta Pruitt stepped out. She was seventy nine, small and stout, in a lavender suit with a pearl brooch. She walked into the bank like a queen entering a ballroom, chin high, handbag pressed to her side.
“Otis!” she cried, as soon as she saw him. “Otis, thank God. This is a terrible misunderstanding.” Mr. Freeman did not stand. He looked at her with a sorrow so deep that it made my chest ache. “Loretta,” he said, “you taught that boy to say your name when anyone asked about my wife. You told him it was a family arrangement. You let him believe it was legal. He stood at that window and answered the question as he had been taught. That is why he said it so fast, and why he believed it. Because you made him.”
Loretta began to cry. It was not a pretty sight. She said that she had only wanted to protect Otis from himself. She said that she was his only family, that the grandbaby would only waste it, that she needed it for her heart medication. The officers listened without comment. Mr. Freeman did not interrupt. When she had run down, he said, very softly, “Loretta, you went through my wallet, my mail and my checkbook. You forged my name, and you sent your own grandson to do your dirty work. I forgave a lot of things. I cannot forgive using that boy.”
Kevin was twenty nine. He sat in the manager office for an hour with his head down and told the detective everything. He had been out of work for a year. His grandmother had told him it was a loan from his great uncle, a formality, a favor. He had signed the power of attorney form himself, thinking it legal. He wept when he learned what it truly was. The detective, a woman with a kind and tired face, recommended that the charges against Kevin be reduced if he testified. Mr. Freeman, hearing it, nodded slowly. “That boy is not the problem,” he said. “He is the casualty.”
Loretta was charged with forgery, attempted theft and elder financial exploitation. She pleaded guilty in January. The judge, who had known Mr. Freeman from the VFW, gave her three years of supervised probation, a restraining order, and full restitution. Kevin received a year of community service, and Mr. Freeman asked, to my surprise, that he be allowed to serve it at the post office where the old man used to work. Every Saturday that spring, I saw Kevin carrying mail up Lakeland Drive in a blue vest, with Mr. Freeman standing on the steps, giving advice.
On the second Friday of May, Mr. Freeman came to my window at 10:15, as always, in his pressed shirt and VFW cap. He slid a small envelope under the glass. Inside was a savings deposit slip. Beneath my name, in his neat mail carrier handwriting, he had printed a line: Beneficiary of College Fund. Granddaughter Alma Freeman. Trustee: Rhonda Jeffries. I looked up at him. My eyes were stinging. “Mr. Freeman,” I whispered, “I cannot accept this.” He smiled his slow, gentle smile and tipped his cap. “Miss Rhonda,” he said, “you asked the right question. Now somebody has to keep asking it.”
The coffee is still two creams, no sugar. He brings it every Friday, and I drink it at the window while he tells me about Alma, who starts at Jackson State in the fall. We never talk about the Thursday in March. But sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary morning, when a well dressed stranger slides a slip under the glass, I think of an old man in a VFW cap, standing at the back of a line, holding two cups. Then I smile, and I ask, politely, for one more piece of identification.