The headline finished on the screen of the laptop of Stan: Boyfriend Of Mother Charged After Two Boys Found In Locked Room. It was a news story from the Toledo Blade, dated twelve years before. The photograph showed a man on the courthouse steps in handcuffs, thinner, with a shaved head, looking at the camera with flat blue eyes. The caption gave his name as Dennis Rudd. I looked at the face for a long time. It was the face of the man who had stood next to my daughter in law at the funeral, holding her purse.
The article was short and ugly. In 2011, in a rented house in Toledo, a woman named Marcia Hale had been working double shifts at a diner while her boyfriend, Dennis Rudd, stayed home with her sons, ages five and seven. A neighbor had called the police after hearing banging. The boys were found locked in a back bedroom, with a bucket for a toilet and no food. One of them had been in there four days. Both survived. Rudd was convicted of child endangerment and served five years. A note at the bottom said he had since changed his name.
Stan closed the laptop. He is seventy one years old, a big man with hands like shovels and a voice made for crowds, and in that moment he looked like someone had let the air out of him. He said, “Dot, I should have gone through the file of that man the day he walked into the plant. I vetted a stranger as a friend.” I told him it was not his fault. Joey, at the table, was drawing a car on a paper napkin. He did not look up. He said, “Dad told me not to let Derek be alone with Max.”
A father who investigates the danger in his own family has already given his sons the best protection a man can leave.
I put my hand over my mouth. The letter from Mike was in front of me, in his square engineer capitals. Ma, I met a guy at the union hall in August who knew Derek from Toledo. He told me what happened. I did some digging. I think Stacy does not know. I am going to tell her after the holidays. If I do not get the chance, please protect my boys. The title of the Mustang is in the case, signed over to Joey. It is a small thing but it is a start. It is the only thing I have that Derek wants, and I do not mean to let him have it.
We called Detective Alvarez of the Hamtramck police, a tired, kind man in a rumpled blazer, who sat at my table and watched the video from the flash drive. He asked to keep the laptop. He called Toledo. By nine that night, he was able to confirm what we feared. Derek Lane was Dennis Rudd. Under the new name he had been working at three plants in two years, and had two more girlfriends with children. The last one, in Dayton, had filed a complaint in the spring that was still in a pile on a desk.
Stacy did not know. I believe that, to this day. She came to my door at eleven on Saturday morning, ashen, with her hair in a rubber band and no makeup, and stood in the porch light. She said, “Dorothy, the detective came to the house.” She began to shake. She said she had met Derek at a bar a month after the funeral. He had been so kind. She had been so lonely and so angry at Mike for dying. She had not wanted anything but a man to sit across a table from. She slid down the wall of my porch and covered her face.
I did not say anything. I sat on the step beside her, and after a moment I put my arm around her. She cried the way a woman cries when she has just seen the edge of a cliff. She said, “I was going to let him adopt them.” I said she had not, and that was what mattered. She said, “I said terrible things about Mike.” I said Mike would forgive her. I said so with some confidence, because he had been a forgiving man. We stayed on the porch until the street lights came on.
They arrested Derek on Sunday at the garage where Mike had died, where he had gone, with a trailer hitch and a friend, to take the Mustang. He found Stan in the driveway, sitting in a lawn chair with his arms folded, and two officers parked across the road. The Mustang was already on a flatbed, headed for storage in the name of Joey. When Derek saw the officers he swung at Stan, who did not move, and the officers took him down on the gravel. It was all over in about a minute.
He pleaded guilty to using a false identity and to violating the terms of his release in Ohio. Because of the old conviction he went to prison for six years. The judge in Wayne County, a gray haired woman, awarded temporary custody of Joey and Max to me, with supervised visits for Stacy, and an order that she complete a program of counseling. She did it, every session, driving forty minutes each way. By the following summer the court allowed her to have the boys back on weekends. They slept at her place in a pair of bunk beds she put together herself.
The Mustang came home in July. Stan and the guys from the plant spent the weekend restoring the paint, and on Sunday afternoon they rolled it out of the garage and into the yard, a blue ghost with the sun on the chrome. Joey, ten now, climbed into the driver seat. He grinned. He put his hands on the wheel at ten and two, as his father had taught him. He said, “Busia, it smells like Dad.” I stood on the lawn and looked at my grandson, and a warm wind came across Hamtramck, smelling of sausage and summer.
