Dr. Hartmann received us in his small office above the pharmacy on Main Street in Fredericksburg, at four o clock on a Thursday afternoon, with the blinds half drawn against the Texas sun. I am Walter Brennecke, eighty four years old, and I had brought my daughter Karen, my reading glasses and a cane I did not need. The nurse had told me on the telephone that the doctor knew my son in law Doug from somewhere else. I wanted to learn where. Doug had made eleven calls from the parking lot of our church that Sunday, and the last of them had gone to this man.
The doctor was a quiet, stooped man of sixty, with kind eyes. He sat down behind his desk and folded his hands. “Mr. Brennecke,” he said, “I am going to tell you something that your son in law asked me to keep private. I am doing it because Doug is not able to say it himself. He and I sit in the same room every Tuesday night at the Lutheran church in Comfort. It is a recovery group. I am his sponsor. The eleven calls were a man trying to hold on for one more hour.” Karen made a small sound beside me.
I had not known. Karen had not known either, though she had known that Doug drank. For two years he had been drawing from the hardware store money that I had given to the family, the two point five million dollars from the sale, and I had thought he was being generous with it at the church. In fact, the doctor said, he had been paying his debts at a bar in Kerrville, and he was terrified I would find out. He had been on the church lot that Sunday because he had almost walked into the bar again, and had called for help.
A church parking lot where eleven calls were made gave one old man the afternoon to bring his son in law back to the family in Fredericksburg.
I gave my terms from my chair, with my hands on the head of my cane. “Doctor, I would like Doug to come into this room, and I would like to look at him. I am not going to shout. I have been a hardware man for sixty years and I have seen every kind of broken thing. I would like him to enter a proper treatment program, and I will pay for it. I would like the bar in Kerrville paid, once, and then never again. And I would like my daughter to stay beside him, if she is willing.”
Doug came in through the door of the waiting room a moment later. He had been sitting out there for an hour, in the same pew like chair, in a clean white shirt, with his hat in his hands. He was forty eight years old, gray in the face, and he stood in front of me and could not speak. Then he went down on one knee, which at his age took some effort. “Walter,” he said, “I took forty thousand dollars. I meant to put it back. I have been so ashamed that I could not look at the photograph of Ilse on your piano.”
I did not answer at once. I put my hand on the shoulder of his shirt. And that was the moment the door of the office banged open and a stocky man in a leather vest, whom I had never seen, shoved his way in, red faced and smelling of whiskey. “Doug,” he barked, “you owe me eleven thousand dollars!” He seized the ledger from the desk of Dr. Hartmann, which held the notes of the group, and turned to run. The doctor, seventy years old, rose half out of his chair, too slow.
But the pharmacist from downstairs, a large and cheerful woman named Mrs. Ochoa, had followed the man up the stairs with a mop in her hand, and she blocked the doorway with the mop held crosswise like a gate. “You are not leaving with that,” she said. The stocky man tried to push past her, and the mop caught him square across the middle and sat him down hard on the carpet, with the ledger sliding out of his arms. Karen stepped forward and picked it up. She handed it back to the doctor without a word.
The money consequences were clean. The man in the leather vest, who owned the bar in Kerrville and had been lending to Doug at ruinous rates, was charged by the sheriff with usury and assault. The forty thousand dollars was repaid by Doug from the sale of his boat, and the remainder of the two point five million dollars was moved into a family trust, with Karen as trustee. Doug entered a thirty day program in San Antonio the next morning. He came out thin and shaky and humble. He has not been inside a bar since.
In the name of my father August, who passed in 1989 and who founded the hardware store, I started the August Brennecke Fund. It pays for treatment beds, sponsor training and free financial counseling for families, in Gillespie, Kerr and Kendall counties. In the first year we placed thirty four people in treatment and trained twenty sponsors. One was a retired rancher from Comfort who drove forty miles every Tuesday night to sit in the same folding chair. He told me the coffee was terrible and he would not miss a week.
On a Sunday in the fall, Doug and I sat in the front pew of our church, in the cool of the morning, with Karen between us. He had been well for a year. After the service, in the parking lot, in the same place where he had made his eleven calls, he turned to me and held out his telephone. “Walter,” he said, “would you hold this for me?” I took it, and I put it in my coat pocket, and we walked together to the car.
