The Canton policeman who was the brother of Lauren read the name at the bottom of the auditor report, and then he looked at his brother in law and asked me again whether Mike knew who had bought the stores. I am Stan Kowalczyk, eighty one years old, and I stood in front of a muted television in Fairlawn with a plate of wings going cold on the coffee table. “Great Lakes Auto Service of Columbus,” I said. “They bought nine stores, a payroll and every sheet of paper in the back offices. And their loss prevention man will ring the bell in about a minute.”
The bell rang, two sharp notes, and on the television somebody kicked a field goal that nobody saw. The policeman opened the door, and in stepped a short, stout man in a gray overcoat, with a clipboard and a snow dusted hat, named Mr. Feeney. He took off the hat politely. “Mr. Kowalczyk, Mr. Mike, folks, I apologize for the intrusion on game day,” he said. “I have a warrant to inspect the inventory records of Store 6 and to record any property connected to the shortage.” He looked at the coffee table, where the Michelin label lay beside the wings with the sticker of the store still on it.
The shortage was two hundred and twelve sets of tires, which Mike had sold through the back door at a third of the price over two years. Eighty five thousand dollars, in cash and in payments to a man in Youngstown who ran a used car lot. The money had gone, not into the Jeep, which had been paid for with a loan I knew nothing about, but into five betting applications on his phone, which had lost him one hundred and forty thousand dollars. Lauren had not known about a dollar of it.
A tire label found on a workbench gave one old tire dealer the halftime hour to bring his son back to his family in Akron.
I gave my terms to my son, in front of his wife and her family, and in front of the tall man with the clipboard. “Mike, Mr. Feeney has agreed that if you repay the eighty five thousand dollars over five years, the company will not press charges. I will sign for the first year of payments out of my own pocket. You will take down every betting application tonight, in front of Lauren, and on Monday you will meet a counselor in Cuyahoga Falls. You will not manage another store. I am sorry, son. But I will not let you lose everything.”
Mike did not argue. The garage heater clicked on somewhere behind the wall, and the smell of fresh rubber and cold concrete came faintly through the kitchen, the smell of the first shop I ever opened, the smell of a whole life of honest work. He sat on the arm of the sofa with his big hands dangling between his knees. “Pop, I started with ten dollars on a Sunday game,” he said. “Then it was a hundred. Then I was selling tires to cover the hundred, and every week I thought the next game would fix it.” He looked at Lauren, who stood by the kitchen door in her Browns sweatshirt with tears on her face. “I told you it was overtime,” he whispered. “There was no overtime. I lied every night.”
Then the shame rose in him like a tide. Mike lunged for the coffee table, snatched the label and the auditor report, and bolted through the kitchen for the door to the garage, evidently thinking of the shredder on his workbench. He crossed the kitchen. He opened the garage door. Standing in it, shoulder to shoulder with a stack of pizza boxes held in front of them like shields, were the cousins of Lauren from Canton, six of them in jerseys, who had gone out for the halftime pizza, and the brother with the badge came up behind him.
Mike ran into the pizza boxes, and pepperoni flew. One of the cousins, a heavy man named Big Tony, caught the report in the air, still holding two boxes in the other hand. “Hey, Mikey,” he said, mildly, “you dropped something.” The brother put a hand on the shoulder of Mike, not hard. The big television in the next room roared with the start of the second half, and Mike stood in the garage door with a piece of pizza stuck to his sleeve and the tears rolling down his face.
The consequences were as I had arranged. Great Lakes Auto Service accepted the payment schedule, and Mr. Feeney signed it in the kitchen on the back of a pizza box. Mike sold the Jeep and moved his family to a smaller house in Barberton. He has repaid sixteen thousand dollars in nine months, driving a delivery truck for a parts distributor. The seven million, seven hundred thousand dollars from the nine stores I placed in a trust for the grandchildren, with a bank in Akron as trustee.
In the name of my wife Anna, who passed in 2017, I started the Anna Kowalczyk Fund. It pays for scholarships for young people entering the automotive trades and for gambling counseling for families, in Summit, Portage and Stark counties. In the first year we sent twenty eight technicians to the trade school in Cuyahoga Falls and placed thirty five people in counseling. One was a tire changer from Kent who had been betting his paycheck on his phone in the break room and now manages a shop of his own.
The following February, on Super Bowl Sunday, I sat on the best chair in the living room in Barberton, the couch itself, and Mike carried in a big bowl of popcorn. Lauren laid down plates. The whole family crowded around, and the game began. At halftime, Mike set a folded paper on my knee. It was a list in his careful hand, titled, nights I did not place a bet. It had one hundred and forty two lines. I put on my glasses and read every one, slowly, one after the other, and when I got to the last line I could not read it for the water in my eyes. Lauren wiped her cheek, and the grandchildren cheered for a touchdown that none of us had seen.
