The woman with the briefcase on the porch was Linda Park, general counsel of the welding supply company in Ohio, and the two men in overcoats were her colleague and a sergeant of the Indiana State Police. Mark stood on his porch in the cold, in his good shirt, holding the shards of his champagne glass and a look I had not seen since he was twelve and broke the neighbors window. I stepped out of the shop into the snow. “Evening, son,” I said. “I made a phone call on the twenty ninth. I used the old landline in the shop, the one nobody checks.”
I told them what I had said on that call, so the whole party on the porch could hear. “I told Ms. Park that my son and his wife had a power of attorney with my forged signature, notarized by the sister of his wife. I told her the folder was in his shop, on the bench, and that I was staying out there between the acetylene tanks. I asked her to come on New Years Eve at 11:40, because I wanted my family to see what the law looks like when it comes to the door. I asked her to bring someone with a badge.”
The thirty guests had gathered in the front hall behind Mark, holding their plates and their flutes, as the sergeant produced a copy of the document. The notary stamp read Crystal Dombrowski. Crystal herself stood at the back of the room, her face the color of paste. The sergeant looked at the stamp and at her. “Madam, your commission expired in March. You notarized a power of attorney for a man who was, at the time, sleeping on a cot in a welding shop. I will need to talk to you.” Crystal sat down on the stairs.
A phone call from a welding shop gave one father the last night of the year to bring his son back to the truth in Crown Point.
I gave my terms in the doorway of the shop, with snow falling on my union jacket. “Mark, I am not pressing charges against you tonight. I want to hear the story first, and I want to hear it from you alone, tomorrow, at my kitchen table. Tammy, you will answer to the sergeant. And everybody else, please, finish your shrimp cocktail and go home. The ball drops in twenty minutes whether we like it or not, and I would not want you to miss it.” A few of the guests laughed, nervously, and then stopped.
Mark came to me at midnight, across the snowy yard, in his shirtsleeves. He stood in front of me, shaking from the cold or something deeper. “Dad,” he said, “I did not know about the notary. Tammy told me it was a standard form, to help with your bills. I signed it because I wanted to believe her.” He took a breath. “And because I was drowning, Dad. I owe forty thousand dollars on the truck and the boat. I thought, just a little from the sale. You would never know.” He was fifty one and crying like a boy.
Just then, Tammy came out of the house with her coat over her arm. She walked fast, straight for the shop door, and I saw what she wanted. The folder on the workbench. She pushed past me, snatched it from the bench, and darted for the side door, through the snow. Joe Wozniak, my neighbor from the old house in Gary, eighty one years old, retired from Local 1014, had been standing in the dark by the woodpile with a cup of coffee. He stepped out and planted a work boot in her path. “Missus,” he said, “I carried steel for forty years. I can carry you inside.”
Tammy sat in the snow and gave up the folder. I stood over her for a long moment. I said I had nothing against her, but she had made a poor choice, and the law would sort out the rest. The sergeant took her statement in the kitchen, and she told everything. A power of attorney, a bank in Merrillville, a credit line. Crystal gave her own statement to a second officer in the living room. By one in the morning, the guests had gone, and the house was quiet as a church, with a few streamers still hanging from the chandelier.
The money consequences were clean. The company wired the full five million, seven hundred thousand dollars into an account in my name only, and the lawyers of Ms. Park put in a rule that no power of attorney could be filed without my in person signature. Crystal lost her notary commission and paid a fine. Tammy pleaded to a lesser charge and received probation. Mark sold the boat and the truck, paid his debt, and took a second job at the mill. I bought a modest brick house in Hobart, and I asked Mark to live with me.
In the name of Helen, who passed in 2021, I started the Helen Szymanski Fund. It pays for welding school tuition, helmets and tools for young workers in Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties. In the first year we sponsored twenty eight apprentices. A young woman from Michigan City, who had been washing cars, laid her first clean bead in an afternoon, and called me from the shop floor. I told her the coating on my rods was what made her bead so smooth, and she said she knew. She had read the patent.
Mark and I work in the garage most evenings now. He holds the work while I lay the bead, or the other way around, depending on the day. The garage heater hums, and the radio plays old polkas. On the first night of the next year, he brought out two bottles of root beer and set one on the workbench. “Happy New Year, Dad,” he said. I clinked it with mine. “Stay warm,” I told him, and we both laughed, and watched the sparks fall like a small bright fireworks.
