The woman who had bought the rocking chair for forty dollars came up my front steps at eight the next morning with an envelope in a plastic grocery bag, and she set it on my kitchen table with great care. She was a small, round woman in a long wool coat, and her name was Maria Rizzo. She had been a nurse at Mercy Hospital for thirty four years. “Mrs. Dunleavy,” she said, “I turned the chair over to oil the runners, and this was taped under the seat.” On the front, in the shaky, careful print of my husband, were two names. Agnes and Patrick. I am Agnes Dunleavy, eighty one years old, and I put on my reading glasses.
Frank wrote it in the spring of 2022, in his last good winter, and taped it under the seat of the rocker where he sat every evening with his crossword. I knew he had written something, but I never imagined that Patrick would be the one to sell the chair. The letter began, “Agnes, my love. If Patrick has sold this chair, then he has also sold the rest, and he is in trouble. Do not be angry with him. I have known about the pills since 2019. I have set aside a trust of two hundred thousand dollars that will pay only to the program at St. Joseph, and the nurse who sat with me can swear to every word.”
Maria Rizzo laid her hand on the table, and I saw that her fingers were trembling. “Mrs. Dunleavy, I nursed your husband at Mercy in his last month,” she said. “He told me about this letter and made me promise to keep it safe. When I saw the chair on your lawn, I bought it so that no stranger would ever carry it off.” Out in the hallway I heard heavy steps on the porch and a key in the front lock, and my son Patrick came into the kitchen with a bag of groceries in his arms, wearing his gray work jacket. His eyes went to the envelope on the table, and he stopped where he stood.
A letter taped under a rocking chair gave one painter widow the length of a morning to bring her son back to the truth in Pittsburgh.
I gave my terms with the letter of Frank open on the table between us. “Patrick, sit down. Your father knew, and he did not hate you, and neither do I. You will go into the program at St. Joseph on Monday, and your father has already paid for it. You will buy back every item you sold from the yard, with whatever money you took, and I will help you find them. You will tell the priest and your sister the truth. And when you come home, we will put the chair of your father back in the front window, where he can see the street.”
My son lowered the grocery bag onto the floor, and his face went slack. “Ma, my shoulder never healed right after the mill,” he said. “I lost the job, and then the pills were the only thing that made me feel like a man again.” He sat down at the table across from me and covered his eyes. “When Dad was sick, I was already using. I was in the next room, and I could not make myself go in. I took the money from the yard sale because I owed a man two thousand dollars, and I thought I could fix it by Friday.” His shoulders began to shake. “I am so ashamed, Ma.”
But panic is a quick thing. Patrick snatched the envelope off the table with both hands, wheeled around, and ran out the front door, down the porch and onto the steep stone steps that lead from our house to the street below. He took four steps. At the landing, Sal Rizzo, the husband of Maria, a retired bricklayer built like a mailbox, stepped into the middle of the stairs. Our neighbor Mrs. DeLuca came out of her door with a broom held crosswise. And at the bottom, in a black coat, stood Father Mike from St. Joseph, who had been walking up to see me with a loaf of bread.
Patrick stood on the cold stone steps with the envelope pressed to his chest, and the early morning bells of the Bloomfield church began to ring. He looked down at the priest and up at me, standing on the porch in my robe. Father Mike climbed one step and held out his hand without speaking. The shoulders of Patrick slumped. He turned, climbed the steps, and walked back past the old woman with the broom, and he knelt on the porch in front of me, in the cold, and handed me the letter of his father with both hands.
The consequences were hard and loving. Patrick went to St. Joseph that Monday and stayed for ninety six days, and I took the bus to see him every Wednesday with a pan of stuffed shells. Maria Rizzo and Mrs. DeLuca visited the neighbors who had bought my dishes and my lamps, and one by one, with a tray of cookies and an embarrassed look, they were returned. The rocking chair came back to the front window with a fresh coat of oil on the runners, and I sat in it every evening to watch the church steps.
In the name of my husband Frank, who passed in 2023, I started the Frank Dunleavy Fund. It pays for treatment beds for working families and for painting and trade apprenticeships for young people, in Allegheny, Beaver and Westmoreland counties. In the first year we paid for thirty seven treatment stays and placed twenty three apprentices with master painters. One was a nineteen year old from Bloomfield who had never held a brush, and who spun his first clean brush in a coffee can with a bicycle spoke, laughing as the paint flew off in a ring.
On an evening in May, I sat in the rocker on my porch with the spring sun low over the hill and the festival banners starting to go up along Liberty Avenue. Patrick came up the steps in a clean white painter shirt, with a ladder over his shoulder. He set it against the porch rail and touched the brim of his cap. “Ma,” he said, “Mr. Rizzo hired me for the summer. I start tomorrow, scraping and priming.” I rocked slowly and looked at my son. “Your father would say you had better use a drop cloth,” I said, and he grinned.
