The two men in suits did not sit down. They stood just inside the door of the banquet room, with their coats open, and the taller one showed me a gold badge folded in a leather case. “Mr. Nowak, we are detectives with the Lake County prosecutor,” he said. “We have a warrant for your son.” I held the last page in my hand, and I read the line that I had avoided for a week. It was a list of seven loans, taken at three casinos and two lenders, and every one of them was signed with my name. Not one of those signatures was mine.
Greg stood at the head table in his good gray suit, holding a plastic fork with a piece of cake on it. He set the fork down. “Dad, I was going to fix it,” he said. “I was going to tell you after the sale.” The detective turned the page over and pointed to the bottom. “Mr. Nowak, the total is four hundred and ninety thousand dollars,” he said quietly. “Your name, your social security number, and a signature that a handwriting examiner says is a copy. That is identity fraud, and it is a felony.” Behind me, the whole room of old bowlers, sixty of them, stopped chewing.
Ryan, my grandson, stood at the back by the coat rack with his hands jammed in his pockets. He was twenty three, as thin as a bowling pin, and the color of old paper. When I looked at him, he looked away. “Grandpa, some of it was mine,” he said, so softly that I almost missed it. “Dad took the first loan to pay my debts. I did not know he used your name until last month.” Tony, my mechanic for thirty years, who had come in his work jacket for the cake, moved up quietly and stood beside Ryan, with one heavy hand on the shoulder of the boy.
A paczki cake left uncut in a banquet room gave one grandfather the weekend to bring his grandson back to the lanes in Hammond.
I gave my terms right there in the banquet room, over the cake. The bowling alleys had sold for five point four million, and every dollar was in a trust that no casino could reach. I would not hide my son. Greg would go with the detectives that night, and I would pay for the best lawyer in Hammond. I would sign a statement that the signatures were forged, and the lenders would have their claims voided. Ryan would enter a treatment program for gambling on Monday morning. And the loans would never be paid with the money of this family.
Greg did not argue. He took off his tie and folded it, and laid it on the table beside the cake. “Dad, I started with a small bet to cover the electric bill at the east lanes,” he said. “It got away from me.” His voice cracked. “I kept telling myself you had so much, and I had so little.” I stood up, a man of seventy seven with a bad hip, and I took the face of my son between my hands. “Gregory Stanley, I gave you everything but the one thing you needed,” I said. “I never told you that you were enough.”
The one who surprised me was Ryan. He walked up the center aisle between the folding tables, past all the old bowlers, and stopped in front of the detective with his wrists held together. “Sir, I want to give a statement too,” he said. “I know who the lenders are. I know the man at the casino who made the second loan. I will tell you everything.” The taller detective studied him for a long moment, and then he lowered his hands. “Son, that is the smartest thing anyone has said in this room tonight,” he said. “Come in Monday, with a lawyer.”
They took Greg out through the lobby, past the trophy case, where the first plaque of the Nowak Lanes still hung from 1962. He did not look back. When the door closed behind him, one of the old bowlers began to clap, slow and low, not for the arrest but for the boy who stayed. Soon the whole room was clapping. Ryan stood in the aisle with his face wet and his shoulders loose, the first time I had seen him breathe all night. Tony put a paper plate in his hand. On it was a thick slice of the paczki cake, with the pink filling running.
The money consequences were slow and just. Greg pleaded guilty to a reduced charge, accepted four years, and agreed to repay what was owed out of prison wages and a share of his own inheritance. The lenders withdrew their claims on my name, and the casinos closed his accounts. The credit bureaus took months to clear my record, and I spent many afternoons on the telephone. Ryan completed his program in South Bend, testified at the hearing, and took a job turning wrenches in the shop of Tony. The trust was untouched, and the new owners kept my name above the door.
In the name of my wife, Helena, who passed in 1999 and who rolled out dough on the kitchen counter every Fat Tuesday for fifty years, I started the Helena Rolling Pin Fund. It pays for treatment, legal help and credit repair for older families in Lake and Porter counties whose own relatives have borrowed in their names. In the first year, we helped eighteen families. A woman of seventy six, in a church coat, sat in the office with a stack of letters in her lap and said, “They all came to my door, and I did not know what to say.”
On Fat Tuesday, I stood in the kitchen of Tony, with flour on my sleeves, rolling out a thin sheet of dough. Beside me, Ryan, now twenty five, measured the rose jam into the middle of each round, and pinched the edges shut with his thumbs. He had gained weight, and he had stopped bouncing his knee. Tony dropped the first batch into the oil, and the smell rose through the shop, sweet and hot. Ryan lifted one out with a slotted spoon and held it up to me. “Grandpa, I did these myself,” he said. “They are ugly.” I ate three.
