Part 3 — Second Signer
The auditor read the name slowly, the way you read a word you hope you have got wrong. “Rhonda Ash.” My wife. Rhonda reached for the edge of the table, and then her hand found nothing, and the paper plate with her slice of cake slid off and landed face down on the concrete of Bay 2.
Nobody in that garage said a word for what felt like a minute. A bus idled in the next bay. Then Rhonda spoke, and her voice was thin as thread. “Del, I signed it because Corey said it was for your retirement. He said it was a savings account the county would match. He told me not to tell you, so you would be surprised.” I looked at my wife. I could not tell if she was lying. I think she could not tell either.
The auditor, whose name was Ms. Mercer, did not rush us. She said the signature card had been signed in the spring of 2019 at the bank in Huntington, with my Social Security number, which nobody could explain how Corey got. It carried my signature, which was forged, and the signature of Rhonda, which was real. A real signature on a false account was exactly the part the law cared about. A person is allowed to be fooled. She is not allowed to keep quiet after she finds out.
I asked Rhonda the question I had to ask. “When did you know?” She sat down on an overturned bucket and held both sides of her face. “Last Christmas. I saw a statement. I asked Corey, and he said it was just paperwork, and he cried, Del. He cried like he did when he was twelve. I told myself it would work itself out. I gave him eleven months of my silence.”
The auditor smiled for the first time all afternoon. “The bank flagged the transfer of last Tuesday, Mr. Ash. We froze the receiving account this morning. Every cent of the $186,000 and the rest of the county money will go back to Pike County.” A man can hide cash in a crate for eleven years, but he cannot hide it from a bank that keeps its records.
Corey started for the bay door, and he got six steps. The detective set a hand on his shoulder. He did not fight. He turned around with an expression I had not seen since he was seventeen. “Del, I wanted to be somebody,” he said. I told him, “You were somebody. You were the boy I taught to read a micrometer.” He sat down on the concrete beside the dropped cake, and the detective let him.
Corey was indicted for theft by deception, forged invoices, and identity theft. He pleaded guilty in the winter and received a sentence of five years, with a restitution order that follows him out. The two parts suppliers in Huntington who had written false invoices were charged separately, and the county ended every contract with them. Rhonda cooperated from that night on, pleaded to the lesser charge of concealment, and was given probation.
The state auditor used every invoice from my Maxwell House can. All six years of them, smoothed flat on a table in the courthouse. The county board voted unanimously to restore my position and my back pay. The court sold the pickup of Corey, and my $36,000 came back to me in the spring. I used part of it to buy a new socket set, because I wanted to, and the rest went into a savings account that has only my name on it.
The auditor told me one more thing that I think about almost daily. Every bus on the road in Pike County had passed through my hands on Saturday mornings, off the clock, for six years, even after they took away my wrenches. I had checked them all myself, brakes and lines and lug nuts, because I could not stand to see a child ride on a bus I had not looked at. She said that was the only reason the county still had a school year.
I did not leave Rhonda that night, and I did not take her back that night. We sat in the truck at the Dairy Queen and neither of us ordered a thing. I told her she could stay at the place of her sister until we both knew who we were. It has been seven months. We eat Sunday dinner at a table with a tablecloth between us, and that is where we are. I keep my coffee hot and my door unlocked.
The superintendent asked me to come back as shop foreman, and I told him I would do it on one condition. I wanted to teach. Now three apprentices from the vocational school follow me around Bay 2 every morning. I make each of them read an invoice out loud before they touch a wrench. If the price does not sound right, they have to say why.
My workbench is in the same place it always was, and the old crate is gone from underneath it. In its place I keep a push broom. Nobody asked me to. Some mornings I sweep the floor before the boys arrive, just to hear the bristles on the concrete, and remind myself that I was never furniture.
