The name on the pickup log was Marcia.
My daughter. Who went outside with the young fella and the deputy and stood on my front walk for twenty minutes while thirty of Dubs buddies from the dealership looked at their shoes.
I did not go out. I sat in my recliner with the tackle box at my feet and I waited, because I had already figured out most of it, and the rest was hers to tell.
Here is how it went. The rental company sends a technician every six months to check the rail and the battery. The next visit had been on the calendar for the week after my wife passed. Dub could not have a technician show up and find no stairlift. So he told Marcia that the company needed a signature to put the unit on hold for service, now that her mother was gone, and he put the form in front of her at the kitchen table three days after the funeral.
She signed it. She was burying her mother. She would have signed anything.
What the form actually did was tell the company that the lady of the house had authorized the unit to be removed for servicing by the renter, which is a thing you can do if you are the renter and you are moving it to another floor. Dub needed that signature on file so that when the rail disappeared, the paper trail would show the family had asked for it.
He sold it the next day in Lewiston for six hundred dollars. He told the buyer it had belonged to his late mother-in-law and he could not stand to look at it.
He had used my daughters grief to sign her name on the paper that took her mothers stairlift, and then he told me to crawl.
Marcia told the deputy all of it on the front walk, and when she came back in she did not go to Dub. She went to me. She knelt down by the recliner and she said, Dad, I signed it. I did not know what it was. And I told her what I had figured out under the garage light, which is that the plate under the radiator and the contract in the tackle box had both been pointing at Dub from the start, and that her name on a form did not change what he did with it.
The deputy took Dub to the station that afternoon. He did not resist. He did stop at the door to say that it was all a misunderstanding, and the young fella in the polo said, Sir, you sold our equipment to a man in Lewiston for cash, and that is not a thing that gets misunderstood.
He was charged with theft by unauthorized taking, which in Maine, at that dollar amount, is a felony. He pleaded in the fall. He paid the company for the unit. He paid the man in Lewiston back his six hundred dollars. He has a record, and he has no key to this house, because I changed the locks the week he was arraigned, and I did it with a buddy from the waterfront who was glad to help.
Marcia was not charged. The deputy and the prosecutor both understood what a signature means when a man hands a grieving woman a pen. She told the truth, and the truth was enough.
The company put in a new rail the following week. Same model. The young fella installed it himself and did not charge me for the visit. I asked him why. He said his grandmother had one and he knew what it was for.
I sleep upstairs now. In my own bed. Fifty-two years of marriage and I still sleep on my side of it.
Marcia is in the little room off the hall. She asked to stay. She filed in July and she is not in a hurry, and neither am I. She makes coffee in the morning and she does not tell me to let anything go.
The lock came off the liquor cabinet. I took it off with a pry bar from the tackle box, and I poured two fingers of the good stuff, and I rode the chair up my own stairs with the glass in my hand like a man who has earned it.