What Brittany called her other account was a savings account at a credit union in Perrysburg, opened four years ago in her maiden name, and I found it out with the help of Destiny and a woman from the credit union named Mrs. Holcomb. Destiny had written her own cell number on the back of the receipt, and she told me Mrs. Holcomb was her aunt. By Friday afternoon, in her aunt office in Perrysburg, I was looking at a statement that showed thirty eight thousand dollars. I held it with both hands, the way I used to hold a hot pan of pierogi that I had forgotten to put a towel under.
Every deposit in that account came from Kenny. Not the paycheck, the overtime, the extra routes in December and the checks from the holiday rush at UPS, which he thought went into their joint account, but which Brittany had rerouted to herself with a form she signed in his name. He had been working sixty hour weeks for four years and wondered why they were still behind. Beside the statement lay a printed lease for a rental house in Sarasota, with a start date of April first. There was one name on the lease. It was Brittany. The children were listed, and Kenny was not.
I carried the statement home in my purse like a hot casserole. I did not say a word at dinner. I watched Ellie push peas around her plate and Mason spill milk on his sleeve and Ava read the back of the cereal box, and I thought about how many mornings I had said nothing so as not to disturb the peace of a house that was not at peace at all. After the children were in bed, I called my son. “Kenny,” I said, “come over to my kitchen after your shift. Do not tell Brittany. And bring your hands, because you will need them.”
A rerouted paycheck gave one daughter in law the length of a Christmas week to bring her mother in law back to the truth in Toledo.
I gave my terms to Brittany and Kenny at my kitchen table at ten o clock on Saturday morning, with the pierogi board between us and a plate of fresh pierogi going cold. I laid out the statement, the lease and the receipt of Target in a row. I said the money in the Perrysburg account would go back to Kenny, that the Sarasota lease would be canceled, and that Brittany would sign a paper leaving my house within thirty days in a way that kept the children close to both parents. I said that I would never sign any deed in March, or in any other month.
Brittany looked at the statement for a long time. Then she said it was not all as bad as it looked. Then she said it was worse. She admitted that she had been planning to leave in the spring, that she did not love Kenny and had not for years, and that she was ashamed of living in a house her mother in law owned. She said the boutique had never made a dollar. “Phyllis, I wanted something that was mine,” she said. Kenny put his hand on the table, palm up, without looking at her. “You could have asked,” he said.
Brittany snatched the statement from the table, meaning to run upstairs with it and burn it in the bathroom sink, and she bolted down the hall in her socks, past the angel of Stan on the Christmas shelf, with the paper held to her chest. I did not chase her. At seventy eight I have learned that the best way to catch someone is to know which door they have to use. The stairs in my house have one very creaky step, the fourth, which Stan never fixed on purpose, and she stepped on it.
Then something happened that I cannot take credit for. On the porch glider, where he had been waiting since morning with a plate of cookies, sat the Toledo Mud Hens mascot, Muddy, a giant bird in a Santa hat. Mason had written him a letter, as a surprise for his grandmother, and the team office had actually sent someone in the costume. Brittany came down the stairs and out the front door and ran straight into the arms of the bird. He lifted her off her feet. The children screamed with joy from the window. Muddy held on, the way a mascot does, and honked.
Brittany signed the paper on the front porch, in the shadow of a giant beak, which I am told made it easier. The credit union returned the money to Kenny after a letter from my lawyer on Monroe Street. The Sarasota lease was canceled. Brittany moved to an apartment in Sylvania in January, and the children spend Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other weekend with her. She is polite now, and she brings pie. The Target on Monroe Street gave Destiny a raise and a plaque. I still keep her number in my coat pocket.
In the name of Stan, who passed in 2020, I started the Stan Grabowski Angel on Top Fund. It pays for lawyers and housing counselors for older homeowners who are being pressured to sign over their houses to family, in Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties. In the first year we helped eighteen people stay put, and the first was a retired bakery worker from Oregon, Ohio, named Mrs. Szymanski, whose grandson had a deed ready for her in a blue folder. Every client receives a small porcelain angel from a church sale, and a card that says, “Looks just like you.”
This Christmas Eve, Kenny and the children and I stood in the living room around the tree, and Ellie held the old angel up to the top, standing on a stool, on tiptoe. Kenny held the stool. Brittany came for an hour and stood at the doorway. She did not come in. She waved at the children. Then Ellie shouted, “Grandma, she looks just like you!” and the whole room laughed, even Brittany, even the angel, I thought. I put my hand on my heart and looked up, because I knew Stan had been right all along.
