Part 3 — Saturday Morning Photo
The face in the photograph was Dennis Marsh, the manager of our store. For three years he had handed me my schedule every Friday and asked about my knees. Mr. Abernathy turned the laptop around so the deputy could see it, and Dennis, over by the cake table, put down the spatula as if it had suddenly become very heavy.
“Dennis?” I said. It came out as a croak. He did not deny it. He walked across the parking lot with his hands out in front of him, the way a man walks across ice, and he stopped near the grill. “Curtis, I am so sorry,” he said. “Ruth Ann passed in February. The system kept sending her checks. Kenzie came to me in March and said if I clocked her in on Saturdays, there would be an envelope in it for me.”
He hung his head. Bonuses for managers are hard to come by, and the tuition payments for his daughter at Hagerstown Community College were months behind. He had told himself it was a victimless thing, since Ruth Ann was gone and the check just went to a computer. He had not let himself think about the other end of the computer, which was the credit union account of Kenzie, or about me.
Mr. Abernathy explained what would happen next. Every deposit that had been redirected was traced, and the clock photograph was what ended it. The money owed to Ruth Ann would go to her estate, and the company would repay her family every cent. A letter went to her sister in Williamsport that very week. I thought of Ruth Ann at the register on Saturdays, humming along with the radio, and I was glad someone would remember her name correctly.
The deputy walked Kenzie to his car. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder, her sunglasses pushed up in her hair like a girl in a school play. “Uncle Curtis, I was going to put it all back,” she said. I shook my head. “You pinned it on crooked, honey,” I told her. “That was the first thing I noticed.” She started to cry. She was twenty-three, and I felt no triumph at all, only the weight of her youth.
Bernadine drove up at four in the afternoon with her mouth set in a line. She read the notebook from cover to cover, standing in the parking lot in her church shoes. Then she looked at me. “I was wrong, Curtis,” she said. “I called that child smart and I called you a fool.” “You told me to leave it alone, as I recall,” I said. “That part was half right.” She laughed, and then she cried, and I put my arm around my sister.
The company repaid every hour of the seventy-one weeks at the correct rate, and the Social Security office restored my benefit and paid back the months it had missed. In all, $23,480 came back to me, with another $4,000 in damages the company agreed to pay without being asked. I sat on the tailgate of my truck that night looking at the check and thought of how many hours I had spent bent over pallets of feed for it.
Kenzie pleaded guilty to identity theft and payroll fraud. She received two years of probation, a felony on her record, and an order to repay what she took from the seven other employees as well. Dennis resigned and pleaded to a lesser count, and he is working off his share of the repayment at a hardware store across the river. Seventy-one weeks of handwriting in a waterproof notebook had outweighed a whole payroll computer.
The company sent a proper five-year pin in a velvet box, with a letter of apology signed by a vice president. Teresa Quinn, the new manager, pinned it on my vest herself on a Friday morning in front of the whole crew. She put it on straight. People clapped. Nobody called me adorable, and nobody had to. I thanked her and went back to unloading the truck of feed.
They offered me a seat in the office, and I turned it down. I told them I like carrying fifty-pound bags. I like the smell of sweet feed in the morning, and I like the farmers who come in and tell me about their cows. What I took instead was a raise to $18.50 an hour and a stool by the register that I have never once sat on.
I still write every shift in the notebook, though no one asks me to now. Clock in. Clock out. Lunch. It takes about ninety seconds a day. Some habits keep you safe, and some habits are only the shape of a life you have grown into, and I think this one is both.
On Sunday afternoons I drive out to Williamsport and sit with the sister of Ruth Ann on her porch. She tells me stories about Ruth Ann as a girl, the way she could whistle with two fingers. I bring a sack of birdseed from the store. We watch the cardinals come down to the feeder, one by one, and neither of us says a word.
