Colleen walked past me into the living room without being asked. “Daddy, why do you have the phone of Mom?” she said, and her voice had gone thin. “Because it is mine now,” I said. “Sit down, both of you.” Mr. Daubert opened his leather folder on the coffee table and cleared his throat. “Mr. McCready, my condolences. Your daughter has a will signed by Bernadette on September twelfth. It leaves the house on Pioneer Avenue and the savings, about ninety one thousand dollars, to Colleen. You would be allowed to stay upstairs.” Colleen put a hand on my arm. “Mom wanted it this way, Daddy.” I looked at the pearl earrings of her mother and said nothing.
I picked up the phone and read the last message aloud, slowly, the way I used to read the Sunday gospel. “Pay on time this month, Mom. Or Dad finds out what you did in 2016. Your choice.” Mr. Daubert stopped smiling. “Dated the week before the will was signed,” I said. “Mr. Daubert, how do you sign a will for a woman who is being threatened by the person who gets the house?” Colleen laughed, but it came out wrong. “Daddy, that is private family business.” “Then tell me the family business,” I said. “Because I know about the hospital, and I think it is time I heard it from you.”
She cried first. Then she told it. In March of 2016 she owed forty one thousand dollars to a man in McKees Rocks who ran card games in a garage, and he had started sitting outside her apartment in a truck. I was at Mercy Hospital with my heart. Bernie was on the chair beside my bed every night. Colleen came to the cafeteria one morning and begged her mother. Bernie had promised me no more money. So she did something she had never done in her life. She took the cash from the coffee can in our basement, the money I had saved for the new roof, and paid the debt in full.
Francis learns his late wife secretly paid the gambling debts of their daughter, who blackmailed her for nine years, and he forgives them both while holding the daughter to a firm recovery plan.
“Forty one thousand,” I said. “The roof money.” Colleen nodded, wiping her face. “Mom was so scared you would find out. She said you almost lost your life that week, and she had spent your roof on me, and she would rather lose her right arm than tell you.” I felt something go loose in my chest, and it was not my heart. “Colleen, I noticed that coffee can was light in May of 2016. I knew. I figured it was my own forgetting. I put the roof off two more years and never said a word, because I thought I had misplaced it.” She stared at me. “You knew?”
“I did not know where it went,” I said. “But I knew your mother. She never kept a secret for herself in her life. She kept it for you. And what did you do with that kindness? You turned it into a monthly bill.” I held up the phone. “One hundred and eight payments. One thousand dollars each. She paid you one hundred and eight thousand dollars to keep quiet about forty one. You did not need her silence, Colleen. I would have forgiven her in a heartbeat. I would have forgiven you too, if you had only asked.” Colleen put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook.
Michael, my son, had always been the quiet one. When I phoned him, he said only, “Dad, I am coming.” I told Colleen he would arrive by midnight, and that she could stay or go, but the pearl earrings were staying with me. She slid them off one at a time and set them in my palm. They were still warm from her ears.
Mr. Daubert closed his folder with a soft click. “Mr. McCready, I was told this was a straightforward family matter. I withdraw from this representation, effective now.” He looked at Colleen. “Ms. McCready, what you have described, and what is on that phone, is extortion under Pennsylvania law. I strongly suggest you do not contact your father about this will again.” He picked up his hat and went out onto the porch. Through the window I watched him walk down to his car like a man who had stepped in something. The Steelers flag snapped over his head. Colleen did not look up.
I called Michael in Columbus that night, and he drove six hours through the dark. At the kitchen table, with the pierogi pan of Bernie still on the stove, the three of us went through the phone together. In her Notes app I found a letter from Bernie dated October third, addressed to me. It said: “Frank, I am sorry about the roof. I was a coward about it for nine years. Please be kind to our girl. She is sick, not wicked.” I read it out loud twice. Michael wiped his eyes with his firefighter hands. Colleen sat across from us, and for the first time in years she looked like the little girl in the Communion dress.
Here is what I decided. I did not call the police. Bernie asked me to be kind, and I could not put her letter in a drawer. But I set the terms. Colleen had already given back the earrings. She tore up the September will in front of Michael. She signed a paper promising to attend Gamblers Anonymous at Saint Anselm every Tuesday and Friday, and to let her brother hold the password to her bank account. The real will, which Bernie made with Mr. Kowalski on Brownsville Road in 2019, left everything to me and then to both children equally. I told my daughter that would never change.
The part I am proudest of came in January. I took the one hundred and eight thousand dollars, which Bernie had paid and which I could not honestly keep, and opened a college account for the son of Colleen, Tyler, who is a junior at Brashear High. Colleen has not missed a meeting in ten weeks. She came for Sunday dinner with a pie, and this time she asked if she could help roll the dough. We rolled it together, the way Bernie did, and I put the pearl earrings back on the dresser where they belong. The roof finally got fixed in March. The first rain, I stood in the attic and heard nothing, and I said thank you out loud.
