Part 3 — The Pharmacy Printout
The woman from the court turned the pharmacy printout so everybody in the picnic shelter could read the bottom line. Under PICKED UP BY, in blue ink, was a name I knew better than my own. Greg Vasko. My son. He sat on the bench with both hands over his face, and nobody said a word.
Greg began talking before anyone asked him a thing. Two years ago, he said, Paige had handed him a pharmacy slip and told him to collect some medicine for his dad, something to help Walt sleep. He did it because his wife asked, and he never read the label. Walt never swallowed one tablet from that bottle. Greg kept it in the glove box of his truck, felt uneasy about it, and gave it straight back to Paige.
What Paige did next took the court clerk a month to untangle. She used that printout as an attachment for a letter saying Walt was too sick to serve. It was a test run. She wanted to know whether the court would accept a paper like that without asking a single question. It did. So a year later she did the same thing three times in my name, with a letter saying I was mentally incompetent.
I need to say one thing plainly, because I would have lain awake over it for the rest of my life. Walt died of his heart, at home, the way his own father did. The records are clear, the doctors are clear, and the pharmacy audit is clear. The pills were never in his pillbox. I filled that box every Sunday for nine years, and he took only what I put there.
The woman from the court handed me a sealed letter. It was a certified order restoring my standing, with a line in the middle that read “competent in every respect.” She said every excusal signed after the fifteenth of May had been signed by a person with no authority at all. A power of attorney that has been revoked is nothing but a piece of paper with no power behind it.
Paige stood up with her clipboard held against her chest like a shield. A deputy of the sheriff was already waiting at the edge of the shelter, because the court woman had made one telephone call from the parking lot. Paige did not scream. She did not cry. She asked if she could finish her iced tea first.
Lenny, the brother of Walt, kept his word from before. He stood between Paige and the cake table until the deputy walked her out. She was charged with forging court documents, misuse of a power of attorney, and theft from a vulnerable adult. In the fall she pleaded guilty. The Lexus went back to the dealer, the boat was sold, and the credit union received every dollar of the $63,000 within the year.
Greg came to my door that night without Paige. He stood on the porch looking like a ten-year-old who had broken a window. “Mom, I should have asked one question,” he said. “Just one.” I told him I loved him, and that love was not going to pretend. He sold his truck to help pay the restitution and moved in with Lenny for a while. He testified without being asked twice.
Forty relatives still had a whole picnic to finish. So I picked up the big knife and I cut that sheet cake, the one that said VASKO STRONG, into forty slices in nine minutes. Nobody was hungry. Everybody ate. I thought of four hundred sailors in a galley line, and I knew I had never been in better practice.
The next spring a summons came in the mail with my own name on it. I pressed my navy blouse and drove myself to the courthouse in Port Orchard. They seated me, and the other panel members elected me their foreperson. When the clerk read out the roll, she said my name in a clear voice and did not hesitate over it.
I keep the sea bag in the hall closet still, with my dungarees rolled inside it. It is not hiding anything anymore. Some evenings I take it out and sit on the floor with it across my lap, and I think about Walt and the shipyard gate and the way he used to whistle on his way home.
Greg and I have supper on Sundays. He does the dishes, and I let him. We do not talk about it very much. We talk about the Mariners, and about whether it will rain, and about the way a family can grow back, slowly, from the roots.
