“Nearby?” the voice on the line repeated. “Agnes, listen to me closely. Is Scott standing nearby?” I looked out across the porch. Mr. Okafor sat in the wicker chair with his hands on his knees, a sentinel in a gray cardigan. Across the street, the garage sale was winding down, the tables folded, the cardboard boxes stacked on the curb. Scott was counting a roll of bills with his back to me. “No,” I said into the telephone. “He is across the road. I am on the porch with a neighbor.” The man let out a long breath. “Good. I have been waiting four years for this call.”
Dale Brennan was seventy nine, with a voice like gravel in a coffee can, and he told me things I will never forget. He had a photocopy of the check. He had an affidavit from the manager of the bank, a woman named Mrs. Hendricks, who had seen Scott at the counter with the signature of Patrick. He could have charged Scott in 2020. “Your husband asked me to wait,” he said. “He did not want your daughter to carry the weight of it while he was sick. I agreed, and I have regretted it ever since. Agnes, do not confront him. I am forty minutes away. I am bringing a deputy. Keep your face calm.”
I put down the telephone and poured two glasses of lemonade from the pitcher in the kitchen. My hands were shaking, but I found that if I counted the ice cubes, they stopped. Mr. Okafor, who is a patient man, took the glass and said nothing. He only glanced at the rolled paper still in my lap and at the street, and then with great courtesy he began to talk about the weather, the way one might to calm a bird. At twenty minutes to five, a plain tan car turned into my driveway, and a gray haired man stepped out with a deputy behind him.
A man who hides his proof in a mower handle trusts his wife to find the truth by doing the work she loves.
Scott crossed the street with a pie box in his hand, smiling at the strangers. “Ma, who are your friends?” he asked. “Sheriff Brennan,” said the older man pleasantly, holding out his hand. “Retired. I knew your father in law, Scott. We went to many a funeral together.” The grin of Scott went a little stiff. “Well, that is nice,” he said. “We were just talking about getting some help for Ma around the house.” “So I understand,” said the sheriff. He took a folded paper from his pocket. “This is a check from the savings account of the Duffy family for eighteen thousand dollars. Would you like to tell me whose signature it bears?”
Scott said it was a loan. He said Patrick had agreed. He said, in a voice that rose with each word, that nobody could prove otherwise. Dale Brennan let him talk. Then he said, “Patrick wrote down that he did not. Patrick put it in a letter, and he put the letter in the handle of a mower so that his wife would find it. A man does not do that unless he is very, very sure.” Scott opened his mouth, and I saw him look at me, at last, as if for the first time in forty years. I did not look away.
My daughter, Janet, arrived at five fifteen. The sheriff had telephoned her himself. She came up the path from her car in her nurses scrubs, white faced, and stood at the foot of the steps while the deputy took out a pair of handcuffs. “Scott,” she said in a whisper. “Tell me that is not your handwriting.” He could not. He tried to say her name, and it stuck in his throat. The deputy led him to the car with one hand lightly on his shoulder. He did not struggle. I think a man like that has been running so long that he is almost relieved to stop.
The rest unfolded over the following months. In the glove box of the truck of Scott, the sheriff found a draft of a power of attorney, drawn up by a lawyer in Cedar Rapids, with my name typed on it and a blank for my signature. The eighteen thousand had gone to a man in Dubuque who ran card games in the back of a restaurant. Scott admitted to forgery and theft from a vulnerable adult, and he received six years. His motorcycle and his truck were sold for restitution. Janet filed for divorce the same week. She sat in my kitchen for hours, and I did not say a word. I only kept the tea hot.
At the bottom of the letter of Patrick, below the telephone number, there was one more line. I had not noticed it in the porch light. It was written very small, in pencil, as if he had added it later. “Agnes, mow slowly. You are doing fine.” I read it aloud to Janet that night, and we both laughed through our tears, because he always did think that I mowed too fast. Then she took my hand and said she would move home, if I would have her. I said there was a bed upstairs with her name on it, and always had been.
Mr. Okafor repaired the mower. He straightened the handle, welded a cracked bracket in his garage, and ground a new edge on the blade until it could slice a sheet of paper. When he rolled it back across the street on Sunday morning, I tried to pay him the twenty five dollars that Scott had been given. He would not take it. “Mrs. Duffy,” he said, “I bought it from a man who had no right to sell it. I only held it for you.” He showed me how to sharpen the blade myself, with a file and a vise, and I did, and my hands remembered his.
Now I mow on alternate Saturdays and Mr. Okafor mows on the others, and the neighbors have started to do the same, so that the whole street looks like a green quilt. It takes me two hours, with breaks. The smell of cut grass hangs in the air, and the swallows dip and turn over the fence. I stop at the end of each row and wipe my face with the sleeve of my shirt. Somewhere beside me, in the hum of the blade, I can almost hear Patrick walking along, saying, slower, Agnes, slower. I laugh, and I slow down.
