Part 3 — The Thirty Two Signatures
Bonnie knew it first. She had signed forty years of Christmas cards beside that handwriting. The loop on the capital R, the K that leaned backward like a man ducking a wind. The inspector laid the gas line permit on the cake table, and nobody in the VFW hall needed to be told whose hand it was. It belonged to our son.
Jared had stopped smiling at the microphone. He tried one more time. “Dad signed everything, he just forgets,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. A pipefitter I trained in 1994 stood up in the back row and said quietly, “Jared, sit down.” To my surprise, he did.
The inspector explained it in plain words. Jared had never passed the master exam, so he borrowed my license number for every permit and signed my name himself. Thirty-two times in fourteen months. On the duplex job at West 26th Street he hired an unlicensed crew, skipped the pressure test the law requires, and signed the final inspection so it would look finished. That one signature was the whole reason the work had never been checked.
I want to be careful here. A young woman named Alyssa lost her life in that building, and nothing I write will ever be big enough for her. The report of the fire marshal said the cause was a gas fitting that had never been tested. Her mother and father, Gloria and Mark, drove down from Corry that same week to stand outside the burned walls. I went and stood with them. I told them it was my name on that paper, and that I would never let it be used that way again.
Bonnie sat down on a folding chair and held a paper napkin against her face. “Russ, you told me, and I told you to let it go,” she said. “I looked at my dish towel while my boy forged your name. I am so sorry.” I put my hand on her shoulder. We had been married forty-four years, and it was the first time she had ever said that sentence.
Jared did not fight. Two officers walked him out through the side door with his Yuengling still in his hand, and the hall was so quiet I could hear the ice machine. He was charged with forgery, with falsifying inspection records, and with homicide by negligence. A judge froze the accounts of JK Mechanical LLC that same Monday, and the $88,000 he had moved out of my business went back where it came from.
That could have been the end of it, but it was not the end of the work. Forty-one permits had gone out under my number. Nine were mine. Thirty-two were not, and every one of those buildings had people sleeping in it. The city inspector and I made a list that night on the back of a sheet-cake box.
My old crew came back, every man with his own tools in his own truck. In three weeks we re-inspected all thirty-two jobs with the inspector standing behind us. Four of them had gas fittings that needed to be redone. We redid them for nothing, before the first snow, and put my real signature on every page.
The state board cleared license MP-0417 of any wrongdoing in January. The chair read me the finding over the telephone, and when she finished I could not say a word. That number belonged to me again, the same as my name, the same as the pipe wrench my father gave me.
Jared took a plea in the spring. He received a sentence he will serve and a restitution order that will follow him afterward. I write him every month. He answers some of the letters. All a license number ever carried was a promise that a real person had checked the work.
Gloria and Mark let me start a scholarship in the name of their daughter for nursing students at Gannon University. The first check came out of the first payment on the $88,000, and it was the best money that business ever spent.
In April I bought a heat gun and peeled the last JK decal off the side of truck number four. Bonnie held the ladder. Underneath, the old white paint was still there, and the red letters of the name I started with one van and one wrench. KIEFER PLUMBING & HEATING. We stood in the shop yard on Peach Street, and she took my arm, and for a minute neither of us said anything at all.
