The doorbell rang a second time before I reached the front hall. Vern Olsen had stopped halfway across the living room, in his work boots, with a box of file folders under his arm, and Carol, my lawyer, looked up from the dining table where we had spread the books of Gunderson Heating and Cooling. Brian stood by the fireplace with his arms crossed, and Lauren sat on the couch, white as paper. I opened the front door. On the porch, in a long camel coat and a gray wool hat, stood Gordon, the father of Lauren, with a thin briefcase in his hand. His face was drawn. “Patricia, may I come in?” he asked.
Lauren rose from the couch. “Dad, what are you doing here?” she said sharply. Gordon did not look at her. He came into the hall, took off his hat, and handed me the briefcase without a word. “Patricia, I have been lied to,” he said, and his voice trembled. “Brian came to me last spring and told me you wanted a partner in the business. He asked me for six hundred thousand dollars. He said you had agreed.” He took a breath. “I wired it in March. When you froze the credit line, my bank called me. They said the account was a shell.”
I opened the briefcase on the dining table. Inside was a wire confirmation, a draft partnership agreement, and a copy of a letter on the stationery of Gunderson Heating and Cooling, signed Patricia Gunderson, which I had never seen. Carol picked it up with two fingers, read the signature, and looked at me over her glasses. “That is not your hand,” she said. “And that is not your wording.” I looked across the room at my son. Brian had gone gray. His arms had come uncrossed, and he was gripping the mantel as if the floor were moving. “Mom,” he said hoarsely. “I can explain.”
A doorbell that rang in the middle of a family meeting gave one mother the night to bring her company home to its shop in Fargo.
“Brian, you may explain to the police,” I said. I had not raised my voice. I had spent forty three years in a business that taught me to speak calmly in a house in January with the furnace out, and I used that voice now. “You forged my signature. You took two million three hundred thousand dollars of credit, and six hundred thousand from the father of your wife. You planned to move the company to a shell you controlled and leave me with the debt.” Behind me, Vern set down the box. “Mrs. Gunderson, I found the transfers in the books last week,” he said. “I should have come to you sooner.”
Brian moved. He lunged for the briefcase, a clumsy, desperate grab, and Vern, who had hauled furnaces up basement stairs for thirty years, put one big hand flat on his chest and held him against the wall as gently as a man restraining a calf. “Son, do not,” said Vern. “Do not make this worse.” Lauren began to cry. Gordon stood with his hat crushed in his hands. The doorbell rang once more, and when I opened it, two officers of the Fargo police were on the porch, with snow on their shoulders and the patient faces of men who had been called before.
Lauren wept on the sofa for an hour. She had known about the loans, she admitted, but not about the forgery. She had believed Brian when he said the money was a bridge. Gordon sat beside her and held her hand, and when she was finished, he said very quietly, “Lauren, you will tell the truth, and then you will come home.” She nodded, her face wet. At the end of the evening, she walked across the room, and stood before me with her chin down. “Patricia, I am so sorry,” she said. “I will testify.” I thanked her. I could not yet say more.
The money consequences came plainly. The bank restored the credit line after the forgery was proven, and the loans against the company were voided. Brian was charged with forgery and fraud and, on the advice of his lawyer, took a plea that sent him away for three years. The six hundred thousand of Gordon was recovered, in full, from a shell account in Sioux Falls. The company continued under me and Vern, who became a partner in the spring. We replaced every furnace in the shop, and painted the trucks a bright new blue, and the signs on the doors read Gunderson and Olsen.
After the officers had gone, Gordon and I sat at the kitchen table with two cups of black coffee, the snow falling steadily against the window. He was a retired banker, a careful and courtly man, and he looked ten years older than he had at the door. “Patricia, I should have called you before I wired a dollar,” he said. “I was flattered that my son in law wanted my advice.” I told him that all of us were flattered by someone, once. He laughed, a short, rueful sound. Then he reached across the table, and laid his hand over mine, and left it there until the coffee was gone.
In the name of my husband, Arne, who passed in 2015 and who began the company with one van and a borrowed torch, I started the Pilot Light Fund. It pays for furnace repairs and emergency heating for older families in Cass, Clay and Richland counties who cannot afford a service call. In the first winter, we reached two hundred and ten homes. A widow of ninety, in a quilted robe, met our crew at the door and said, “I have been sleeping in my coat.” Vern knelt by her furnace, and fixed it in twenty minutes.
In January, when the temperature fell to twenty below, Brian wrote me a letter from prison. It was plain and short. Mom, I read the sign in the newspaper. Gunderson and Olsen. I want you to know that is how it should be. Vern earned it. I did not. I am sorry for the cold. I read it twice, standing at the kitchen window, and then I put it in the drawer with the photographs. The furnace hummed below me. It was warm in the house. I thought of my son, and I did not answer, not yet, but I left the porch light on.
