“Doug did not just want the business,” Gary said, and he set the stack of bank statements on my tray table, next to the red cap. “He wanted the building. He took a loan of one hundred ninety thousand dollars against the shop in April, and another of eighty thousand in June, and the last one, just two weeks ago, was a home equity line against your house on Sixth Avenue, for another one hundred ten.” I did the math in my head, the way I do on a pattern. Three hundred eighty thousand dollars. “That house was mine before we married,” I whispered. “My mother left it to me. He cannot borrow against a house that is not his.” “No,” Gary said. “He cannot. He signed your name.”
Doug had not moved. He stood at the foot of my bed with one hand gripping the rail and his face the color of wet cement. Behind him, one of the nurses had slipped out. I heard her voice in the hall, low and urgent, and then the shuffle of heavy shoes. “Pat,” Doug said, “I was going to pay it back. I had a system. I was going to win it all back in a weekend.” The casino in Auburn. I had known. I had known for years, in the quiet back room of my own mind, the way you know that a tooth is rotten. “You hit me,” I said. “In a hospital bed. With a fresh knee.”
Two security officers came in then, large men in blue shirts, and between them a Tacoma police sergeant, a tall woman named Dolores Weaver, with a notebook already open. She did not raise her voice. “Mr. Lund,” she said, “I need you to step into the hall.” “This is a misunderstanding.” “You will tell me about it in the hall.” Doug looked at me one last time, with an expression I will never be able to describe. It was not anger and not guilt. It was something like surprise, as if he could not believe that I could do this to him. Then he walked out between the officers like a man heading for a bus.
A hospital room, a stack of bank statements, and a little red cap signed by Little League kids ended a forged signature scheme.
Gary stayed. He sat in the chair beside my bed and folded his briefcase on his knees, and I saw for the first time that his hands were shaking too. “I should have told you in June,” he said. “I saw the first loan. I thought I could stop it quietly. I kept thinking I could save you the pain.” I took his hand. He had been my accountant for nineteen years and had never once sent me a late bill. “You came today,” I said. “That is what matters.” He started to cry, a gray haired man in a gray suit, and I patted him like a child.
The loans, it turned out, were worthless. Doug had pledged property that he did not own, and he had forged my signature on four documents. The bank, once it was told, froze every account and voided the debt against my house and the shop, and Gary spent the next three months fighting for the rest. The casino debts stayed with Doug. A judge in Pierce County granted me a protective order from my hospital bed, with a stern young bailiff holding the form while I signed. I signed it with a steady hand. Not one letter of the signature shook.
Doug pleaded guilty to felony forgery and assault in the fourth degree, and he was sentenced to two years. I did not go to the sentencing. My daughter went for me, and came to the shop afterward with a box of Chinese food, and we ate it on the cutting table among the bolts of felt. She cried, and I did not. I told her I had cried enough in thirty one years. I told her that sometimes the bravest thing is to stop covering for a person, and sometimes the kindest thing you can do for him is to let the truth walk in.
I went back to work in seven weeks and four days, a week ahead of the schedule of the surgeon, with a cane and a pair of orthopedic shoes. My employees had hung a banner across the shop. WELCOME BACK, PAT. The embroidery machines were running, all twelve of them, and the whole room smelled of thread and hot oil. Marcia from the front counter handed me a cap, a new one, deep blue, stitched in white. Under the logo of the shop, in small neat letters, she had sewn four words. Pat Is Not Done.
The Little League team came the next Saturday. Thirty boys and girls in red uniforms, filing in two by two, with their parents behind them. The coach, who is my grandson and a very serious young man of twelve, took off his cap and said, “Grandma, we have a present.” They had made a banner of their own, on butcher paper, with thirty handprints in red paint and a headline in marker. GET WELL COACH GRANDMA. I had to turn to the window. They stood there patient and shining, and when I faced them again I was smiling through tears.
I run the shop alone now, or rather with a crew of nine people who are more family than staff. We have grown. This spring we started stitching caps for the Tacoma Rainiers, and the team manager says our work is the best he has seen in the Northwest. I cut the ribbon on the second location last month, on Pacific Avenue, a block from the old one. A reporter asked how I felt. I said I felt like a woman who had learned to say no. She asked how long it took me. I said, “Sixty two years and one new knee.”
Some evenings, when the machines are quiet and the last light comes through the front window, I take the red cap with all the little signatures out of the drawer where I keep it. I run my thumb across the Sharpie. I tell myself that I will keep it until I die, and then someone can put it in the box with the rest of my threads. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever sewn, though I did not sew a stitch of it. The children did. They signed it with love, and love, as it turns out, is a very strong thread.
