I looked at the old man in my dining room, and he looked at me, and the silence stretched out like a runway. Harold Stavig was seventy eight, with big hands, a hunched back and eyes the pale blue of a winter sky. He wore my leather jacket as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “Jim, I did not want this,” he said at last. “Jessica came to me three weeks ago. I have not seen her in twenty years. She said she would give me five hundred dollars and a chance to know her.” His voice shook. “I said yes. God help me, I said yes.”
Jessica was standing by the window with her arms folded, breathing fast. “Jim, do not listen to him,” she said. “He is a drunk. He abandoned me when I was a baby.” Harold flinched. The man from Northwest Home Equity Solutions had stopped trying to pack his briefcase. He stood by the door with his coat on, looking at the floor. I took off my jacket, because it was a warm morning, and I sat down at my own table across from the man I had never met, who had been married to my wife. “Harold, tell me about Carol,” I said.
He folded his hands. “I met her in 1969, at a dance in Everett,” he said. “She was nineteen and she laughed like a bell. We had Jessica in 1973. But I drank, Jim. I lost three jobs in four years, and I put my fist through a wall once, and Carol took the baby and left me in 1975. She was right to go. I deserved it.” He wiped his eyes. “The day she left, she stood in the doorway and said, Harold, I am going to find a good man. And I thought, I hope she does. And then she found you.”
A stranger in a leather jacket, a letter in the lining of a pocket, and a pilot who found out who loved him.
Jessica made a small, strangled sound. “That is not true,” she said. “Mom told me she married Jim for his money.” Harold shook his head slowly. “Honey, your mother never said that,” he said. “I wrote to her for years. I kept every letter she sent me. She said Jim Holmgren was the steadiest man she had ever met, and that she had never been afraid of anything since the day she married him.” He drew a worn envelope out of the pocket of my jacket. “She asked me never to tell you where I was, because she was afraid you would go looking for me.”
I took the letter and read it. The handwriting was Carol, the loops and slants of thirty years of grocery lists. She wrote that she had a good husband, a good house on a lake, a daughter who was growing up fast and sulky. She said she hoped Harold had found some peace. And at the bottom she wrote a line that made me put my hand over my eyes. Jim does not know I write to you. He would say, Carol, invite him to dinner. And I think that is why I love him. I looked up. Jessica was weeping into her hands.
The man in the suit slid out the door, and I let him go. A moment later I heard his gray Toyota roaring away down the lake road, and the locksmith van followed him. I picked up the telephone and called Sergeant Bill Tanaka at the Snohomish County Sheriff, a man I had flown with in the Guard. He took a statement from the man by phone from his car, three miles away, after a patrol unit stopped him on Highway 99. His name was Dale Ferris. He had a long record. He had come with a forged reverse mortgage, signed by an actor.
I did not press charges against Harold. I told Sergeant Tanaka that he was an elderly man who had been paid to do a foolish thing, and that I would answer for him. Jessica was another matter. She had forged my signature, hired a stranger, and paid a locksmith to open my door. The prosecutor in Everett agreed to a plea, with probation, restitution and a year of counseling. Jessica stood in the courtroom with her hair gone gray at the roots and said she was sorry. She said it to me, and then, quietly, to the man in the second row, her real father.
That summer, Harold and I flew the floatplane together. I took him up from Martha Lake on a clear Sunday morning, in the old Cessna with the pontoons, and we climbed over the Cascade foothills. He sat in the right seat with his hat in his lap, saying nothing, pressed against the window. When I leveled off at three thousand feet he finally turned to me. “Jim, I stayed away because I thought she was better off,” he said. “She was. She had you.” I said I had been the lucky one, and I meant it.
Jessica came to the lake on the first of August with her hands empty and her head up. She did not call it the cabin. She stood on my dock and looked at the water and said, “Jim, I never thanked you for raising me.” I said she did not have to. She said she did. She said she had been angry for forty years at a woman who had loved her, and had aimed the anger at the one man who had never done her any harm. I held out my arms. “Come here, kid,” I said, and she did.
On Monday morning I drove to the espresso stand on Highway 99. Kylie was leaning on the window ledge with her nose ring glittering. “Morning, Captain Jim!” she said. “Extra foam, no sugar, have a great flight!” I laid a fifty dollar bill on the counter and said I would not take change, and that it was for her honesty. She tried to hand it back. I closed her fingers over it. Then she turned the cup around and wrote one more line on the sleeve, in black marker, and I read it at the first red light. Welcome home.
