Carl Wexley slid his computer screen across the counter, and I looked at the picture of my daughter standing at the pawn shop counter with her hand on the back of my grandson, smiling at a ninety year old man as if she owned the place. I am Frances McAllister, seventy eight years old, of Shively, and I put my palm flat on the glass case to keep from falling. “Mrs. McAllister,” Mr. Wexley said gently, “I called the phone number she gave me for the house sale. A woman answered and said it was New Dawn Recovery of Lexington. But the address on their letterhead is a mailbox store.”
I did not scream. I sat in the plastic chair beside the jewelry case, with the Silver Star in my lap, and I called the number on my bank statement for New Dawn. A recorded voice said the line had been disconnected. I called the bank. The woman there looked up the wires, eleven thousand dollars a month for five months, and read me the name of the account holder on the receiving end. It was not a treatment center. It was Dawn Marie Riordan McAllister. My daughter had been paying herself to be in rehab.
Mr. Wexley called two old friends from the VFW, Hollis and Dub, and they arrived within the hour, in caps and windbreakers, each with a cane. With them came a young Shively police officer named Dolan, who took notes in a small book. Tyler, my grandson, was found asleep on the couch at my own house, curled in his gray hoodie. When I woke him, he took one look at my face and burst into tears. He had known where the money was going, he said, but he did not know how to tell me.
A Silver Star pawned for three hundred dollars gave one grandmother the length of a call from a pawn shop to bring her family back to the truth in Louisville.
I gave my terms in the back room of the pawn shop, among shelves of guitars and tools, to my grandson and my daughter, who had been called on her cell phone and told that her mother had been taken ill. “Dawn, I know where you have been. You will hand over your keys and the rest of what you took. You will go to a real treatment center, the one I choose, and you will stay. Tyler, you will give your phone to Mr. Wexley, and you will go to a meeting tonight. And then, my darlings, we will have supper.”
Dawn sat down heavily on a stool, with her handbag in her lap. “Mama, I left New Dawn after nine days,” she said, flatly. “I could not stand the groups. I started using again. I have been in a motel in Jeffersonville with a man I do not even like.” She bowed her head. “I needed the money for pills and for a lawyer, and then Tyler needed money for the debts, and I kept telling you I was getting better. I wanted to sell the house to start over somewhere clean. I am so tired, Mama.”
But the old terror of treatment came over her. Dawn suddenly grabbed the gray plastic tub from the counter, with the cameo brooch and the pocket watch inside it, and bolted for the front door of the shop, meaning to disappear down Dixie Highway. The bell above the door jangled. Hollis and Dub, two old soldiers on canes, stepped across the doorway side by side. Officer Dolan came around the counter. And Mr. Wexley, ninety years old, rose to his full height behind the register.
Dawn stopped at the door of the pawn shop, with the tub clutched against her chest and the afternoon traffic of Dixie Highway blowing past the window, two veterans blocking the way with their canes crossed. Mr. Wexley spoke in his shaking, gravelly voice. “Young lady, your grandfather carried me off a hill on his back. I would carry you, too, if I could. Set that down.” Dawn looked at the two old men. She looked at the medal in the case. She lowered the tub to the floor and sat beside it, sobbing.
The consequences were stern and loving. Dawn entered a ninety day treatment program in Louisville, a real one, with a state license, and I visited her every Sunday. The police recovered most of the stolen items. Tyler went to meetings for gamblers, and took a job at a car wash, and repaid the loan sharks in small payments over two years. The bank refunded part of the wires, after the investigation. The Silver Star went back into its shadow box, and Mr. Wexley came to supper that Sunday in a clean shirt.
In the name of my father Thomas Riordan, who passed in 1998, I started the Thomas Riordan Fund. It pays for treatment beds and verified recovery programs for the families of veterans and for pawn shop and fraud protection training for seniors, in Jefferson, Bullitt and Oldham counties. In the first year we placed sixty one people in treatment and trained four hundred seniors in spotting scams. One was a thirty four year old mother from Valley Station who walked out of a program with her three year old in her arms and a bright new coin of sobriety in her pocket.
On a chilly Sunday in November, I stood in my living room in Shively and watched Carl Wexley, in his Korean War cap, hang the Silver Star on its small brass hook inside the shadow box. Dawn, six months sober, stood beside me with her hand in mine. Tyler brought the picture of my father in his uniform and set it beside the medal. Carl saluted it with a trembling hand, and Dawn did, too. Then the whole family sat down at the table, and I said grace, and we ate, slowly, with the radio playing quietly in the kitchen.