“Kevin, introduce me to your friend,” I said, rolling down my window. The tall man in my father old green jacket stopped three paces from the car. Up close he was a cheap forgery. The beard was gray paint on a brown one, and the jacket, which I would have known in the dark, sat too tight across his shoulders. “Dad, this is Walter,” Kevin said. “He is a family friend.” I told him that I had been to my father memorial service in 1989 and that no one by the name of Walter Brandt had been invited, living or otherwise. The man shuffled his feet and looked at the pavilion.
I got out of the car. I held up my phone, and on the screen was a text I had received from Teresa at the bank less than a minute before. Hold in place. Wausau police on the way. “Kevin, the man who brought the power of attorney to the Rib Mountain branch this morning signed the visitor log as Walter Brandt,” I said. “The teller photographed him. That is the same face, and the same beard, and the same jacket you took out of my hall closet in July when you told me you were looking for a flashlight.” Kevin opened his mouth and nothing came.
The disbarred doctor made the mistake of running. Gerald Pell, who it turned out was playing the role of my father for two hundred dollars from Shannon brother, bolted for the parking lot, and he got as far as the potato salad table. A teenage cousin with a camera phone filmed the whole thing. Two Wausau squad cars rolled up the gravel drive in a quiet column, without lights. A sergeant I had once hired as a delivery driver stepped out, took one look at the false beard, and sighed. “Mr. Brandt,” he said to me, “I am so sorry for this.”
A stolen jacket on a false beard, a disbarred doctor, and a tube of ninety nine cent glue that held more than anyone guessed.
They took Pell away in the back of a squad car with his paint running down his chin. Shannon went pale and then crimson, and began to say that she had known nothing about it, that it was all her brother idea, and the whole reunion watched. Kevin stood beside the pavilion as if he had been planted there. His children had stopped filming. His daughter, Hannah, fourteen and braver than any of us, walked up to me with her phone held loose by her side and said, “Grandpa, I am sorry about the coffee can. I did not know what it was for.”
I told her it was not her fault. I took the can from the picnic table, where Shannon had left it, and I looked at the label. DAD DENTURE FUND. It was a clean coffee can with a paper label and a plastic lid. “Three hundred and twelve dollars,” I said, loud enough for the whole pavilion to hear. “From my sister, my nephew, and my neighbors, who gave what they could, and meant it.” I put in a check for five thousand dollars on the spot. “This goes to the Marathon County Food Pantry,” I said, “from the people who paid in at the Brandt reunion. Every one of you gets a receipt.”
Kevin followed me to my car after the crowd had gone. He was crying, not the way he did as a boy, hiccuping and furious, but in a plain tired way. “Dad, I owe four hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “I took a second mortgage for Shannon boutique, and the boutique failed, and her brother said he knew a way. I did not think you would ever find out.” I took the tube of drugstore glue from my shirt pocket. I held it up. “Kevin, do you know what this is?” I asked. He shook his head. “It is your grandfather recipe, thinned out and sold for ninety nine cents.”
The prosecutor was kind. Kevin pleaded to a single count of conspiracy, with no jail, five years of probation, and a restitution plan that I agreed to supervise. Shannon brother did not fare so well. I put Kevin to work in the only place I could think of. Brandt Adhesives, under its new owners in New Jersey, kept a small research lab in Wausau, and the manager there owed me a favor from 1998. Kevin started on the loading dock at six in the morning, in steel toed boots, hauling fifty pound drums of resin. At the end of the first week his hands were swollen. He did not complain.
Hannah stayed behind that evening. She came to my kitchen on Grand Avenue and asked, shyly, whether I would show her how the glue was made. I took her down to the garage and uncovered my father old kettle, still bolted to its stand, and the sheet of butcher paper in a frame above the workbench. She read the recipe aloud, word for word, in her careful voice. It had three lines, a ratio, and a signature. She asked why I had kept it. I told her I kept it to remember that the best things are usually simple, and that most of them can be mended.
My former wife Ellen drove in from Minneapolis in the spring. She sat in my kitchen on Grand Avenue, as gray as I am, with a cup of tea. “Arthur, I heard about Kevin,” she said. “I think he has been afraid of you for thirty years. Not of what you would do. Of what he would find out about himself.” I looked at her across the oilcloth. We had not been in a room together for twenty five years. “I should have tried harder to keep the family,” I said. She laughed. “You should have tried harder to talk,” she answered.
In June, Kevin brought his children to my house. On the table he set down a cracked picture frame, a photograph of his grandfather in 1949, standing at the garage kettle with his sleeves rolled. The glass was in three pieces. “Dad, I broke it last winter,” he said. “I could not figure out how to say so.” I took out the tube of ninety nine cent glue, and the four of us sat around the table while I showed him how to join the pieces so the crack was invisible. When it dried, Hannah held up the frame to the window. “It looks better,” she said. “It looks like it was never broken.”