Patrice looked at the picture for a long time. Then she said his name, and it was not loud, and it did not need to be.
Gene.
Her husband. Rubens father. The man who had called her from the road the morning of the funeral to say he was stuck behind a wreck on the Kellogg and would be there as soon as he could, and who had walked into the church at 11:40 with his tie crooked and sat down beside her in the pew.
He was at the ATM on Rock Road at 11:06 with his hand on his sons shoulder.
Gene was at the party. He was by the cake with his brother-in-law, and when Patrice said his name he did not come over. He went out the side door of the hall, and nobody stopped him, and I am glad nobody did, because I have seen what happens when a room decides to stop a man.
Walt sat down in the chair beside me and told me the rest, quietly, while eighty people pretended to look at the cake. The card had been requested online in March from an address in Derby. Genes address. The verification questions had been answered with my wifes mothers maiden name and the year we bought the house, which Gene knew because he had sat at our Thanksgiving table for twenty-six years.
Ruben had the card. Gene had the plan. Six thousand and change was not the point. The point was that my wife had been the one keeping the books, and Gene knew that when she was gone, nobody would be looking for a while.
My grandson had skipped his grandmothers funeral because his father told him a head start was worth more than a goodbye.
Ruben did something that afternoon that I did not expect, and that I have thought about since. He walked over to Walt, in front of everybody, and asked what he needed to do. Not what would happen to him. What he needed to do.
Walt told him. A statement, in writing, at the branch, with the pictures in front of him. Ruben gave it that Monday. He did not leave his father out of it.
The bank made me whole within the month, because a card issued without the account holders knowledge is the banks problem before it is mine. Then the bank went after the money, and the bank is better at that than I am.
Gene was charged with identity theft and with financial exploitation of an elderly person, which is a phrase I did not enjoy hearing applied to my wife. He pleaded in the fall. There was restitution, and there was a sentence, and there was a line in the newspaper, and Patrice filed for divorce the week after the plea.
Ruben was charged too. The prosecutor took his statement into account, and his age, and the fact that he had walked up to a bank manager at his own graduation party and asked what to do. He got a deferred judgment. If he keeps clean for two years, it goes away.
He came to see me in June. He asked if he could work. I told him the funeral home on Broadway was always short a man to wash the hearses on Saturdays, and that I still knew the owner, and that the pay was poor and the work was worse. He said yes before I finished.
He has washed every hearse in that fleet twice a week since. I drive down on Saturday mornings and sit in a lawn chair by the bay door and watch him do it, and I correct him when he leaves streaks, and he does not argue.
Last month I showed him how to lift a casket from the knees. He asked me why. I told him it was the same reason I taught Walt. Someday somebody he loves will need carrying, and I would like him to be in the church when it happens.
The program is still in the breast pocket of my black suit. I did not take the statement out of it. I figure she would want it kept with her, since she was the one who always kept the books.