The pie landed face down on the concrete, and a long silence filled the garage. Dale Whitcomb looked at Ashley, and then at the old machinist on the TV tray with the paper napkin in his lap, and his voice came out low and level. “Ashley, do you know who this is?” She shook her head, and a smear of whipped cream was still on her sleeve. “This is Leonard Szymanski,” Dale said. “He founded the company that you work for. He built every machine in that plant with his own hands.” I am Leonard, eighty two years old, and I set down my fork very carefully.
Ashley turned the color of the napkin. “Pop,” she whispered, “why did you not tell me?” I looked at the woman I had once helped into a job, who now stood in a garage in her good dress, and I answered gently. “You never asked me what I did, Ashley. You only told people that I was nobody important.” Dale shut the side door to the kitchen so the guests could not hear. He put his briefcase on the hood of the lawn mower and snapped it open. “I also need to ask you about a few purchase orders,” he said.
Greg had come to the doorway by now, a heavy man of fifty six in a sweater, with his hands hanging empty at his sides. He did not meet my eyes. Dale took out a folder with a blue tab and said, evenly, “Mr. Szymanski, the audit found that eleven parts orders over two years went to a shop in Auburn owned by the cousin of Ashley, at twice the price. I did not bring this up to humiliate anyone. I wanted to ask you first, since the plant was yours.” Ashley put her hand on the workbench to steady herself.
A paper napkin on a TV tray gave one retired machinist the length of a Thanksgiving dinner to bring his daughter in law back to the truth in Fort Wayne.
I gave my terms quietly, from the TV tray, with the photograph of Helen in my shirt pocket. “Dale, I thank you for coming to me first. Ashley, here is what I ask. You will repay the extra money, and you will keep your job only if Dale says you may. Greg, you will carry the table out of the garage and into the dining room, and you will set a place for your father, tonight. And I will not live in this basement one more week. I am buying the house on Lakeside Drive, and you may visit me there on Sundays, if you are polite.”
Ashley sank onto an overturned bucket, and her shoulders began to shake. “Pop, I did not do it to hurt anyone,” she said. “Greg and I are four months behind on the mortgage, and the cards are maxed, and my cousin said it was only a small favor. I took the first check in a panic. Then it was easy. I thought if nobody knew, nobody would be hurt.” She looked at her hands. “And I put you in the garage because I could not stand to have you watch me pretend to be somebody I was not.”
But the fear came back like a wave. Ashley jumped up from the bucket, snatched the blue folder out of the briefcase on the mower hood, and darted through the side door into the dark yard, meaning to hide the pages in the trash can behind the fence. She ran across the wet leaves. Greg, awkwardly, stepped out of the kitchen door and into her path. Dale walked quickly around the corner of the house. And the neighbor, a retired fireman with a rake in his hand, appeared at the property line and stood silent, waiting.
Ashley stopped in the cold backyard with the folder held against her blouse, and in the lit window of the dining room I could see the guests turning to look. The fireman neighbor leaned on his rake. “Madam,” he said politely, “whatever it is, a trash can is a poor place to put it.” Greg came and stood beside his wife. He did not take the folder away. He only put his heavy arm around her shoulders, and said, in a rough voice, “Ash, give it to my father. Please. We are done.”
The consequences were fair. Ashley repaid the full overcharge from her savings and the bonus of Greg, and Dale kept her on at a lower post under supervision, with a rule that she could never again touch a purchase order alone. Her cousin lost the contract. I bought the house on Lakeside Drive with a porch and a view of the St. Marys River, and I moved in with a lamp and a recliner. On Sundays, Greg and Ashley came for dinner, and Ashley always set the table first, with a cloth, and never a TV tray.
In the name of my wife Helen, who passed in 2022, I started the Helen Szymanski Fund. It pays for machinist apprenticeships and tool kits for young people entering the trades, and for hot meals for widows and widowers who live alone, in Allen, Whitley and DeKalb counties. In the first year we placed thirty seven apprentices in shops and delivered nine thousand meals. One was an eighteen year old from Huntertown who had never held a micrometer, and who measured his first perfect part to a thousandth and ran to show his father at the gate.
On Thanksgiving Day, a year later, I sat at the head of a long table in my own dining room, with the Polish crystal that Helen had loved and a turkey the size of a small dog. Dale Whitcomb sat on my right, and Greg and Ashley on my left, with their two grown children at the foot. Ashley carried in a pie with both hands, very slowly, and set it down in front of me with a nervous smile. I looked at it, and I looked at her. “Perfect,” I said, “and not a bit on the floor.”