On the back of the photograph, in the careful cursive of my grandmother, were two lines. Rick and Dale Mercer, the day he bought the Cadillac with my money. $61,400. March, last year. I sat down on a metal stool in the vault and read it three times, and then I turned the cancelled checks over one by one. The signature on each was almost hers. Almost. She had always crossed her capital H with a little curl, like a ribbon, and on every one of the forged checks the curl was missing. Forty two checks. Mrs. Delaney stood in the doorway and said very softly, “She came in to compare them against her real signature every month, Megan. She wanted to be certain.”
The cassette player in the corner of the vault was an old gray Panasonic that Mrs. Delaney kept for customers who still stored tapes. She slid in the cassette marked For Megan and pressed play. The tape hissed, and then the voice of my grandmother came into the little room, small and bright and perfectly clear. “Megan, my girl. If you are listening, then Mr. Buttons did his job. I wanted to tell your uncle, but I could not, because he is my son and I could not make the words. Now they are yours to carry. I am sorry. I should have been braver.”
She told me everything in eleven minutes. After Grandpa died, Rick offered to help with the bills, and she let him, and the bills grew strange. By the second year, she found a checkbook missing. By the third, a loan in her name for a car she had never seen. “I did not want to believe it,” she said. “So I started saving, ten dollars at a time, in the bear. I wanted you to have a lawyer. I wanted you to have enough to start.” A long pause, then a laugh. “Do not let him have the silverware. It is only plate.”
A hand stitched teddy bear, a safe deposit box, and a cassette tape left a granddaughter the truth about her uncle.
When I came out of the vault, Rick was waiting by the teller line with his arms folded. He had stopped being angry somewhere in the last forty minutes. His face had gone pinched and gray, the face of a boy who has broken a window. “Megan,” he said, “whatever she told you, I was going to pay it back. I had a business idea. It fell through.” “Forty two checks,” I said. “A Cadillac. A loan in her name.” He looked at the bear. “That thing,” he muttered, and for a second I almost felt sorry for him. “That stupid bear.” “She loved you,” I said. “She just could not trust you.”
Mrs. Delaney had called the Peoria police when I walked into the vault. A detective named Kowalski arrived within twenty minutes and took the checks into evidence with white gloves and a brown paper bag. He was polite and tired, and he asked Rick to step into a small side room to talk. Rick went without a word. I think that he had been waiting his whole life for somebody to tell him that the game was over. I did not enjoy it. I stood in the lobby of Heartland Bank with Mr. Buttons under my arm, and I felt very, very small.
The will, it turned out, had been rewritten in March by the notary of Mrs. Delaney and two witnesses from the bank. The house on Brookside Drive came to me. The Singer came to me. The savings, the small account at the credit union, even the quilts, all of it, to me. Rick received the debt of the Cadillac and a letter from his mother, which Mr. Kowalski let him read in the back of the police car. I never learned what it said. I only know that he sat with it for a long time, and that when he came out, his eyes were red.
I did not want him in prison, and I said so. In the end he pleaded to a single count of forgery, with restitution. He sold the Cadillac and a lake lot he had bought in secret, and over the next two years the money came home, a little at a time, in envelopes that he mailed to the bank with no return address. I still do not know whether he is sorry. But the last envelope held one extra sheet, a note in a shaky hand. It said, Tell Mom I tried. I read it standing at the mailbox, and then I folded it in my pocket and went inside.
Mrs. Delaney drove me home that evening and would not let me carry the bear to my own front door. She walked me up the steps of the little house on Brookside Drive and stood in the empty hallway with her hand on the banister, looking at the photographs of my grandmother on the wall. “She talked about you every Tuesday,” she said. “How you drew horses on napkins. How you were always the one who read the labels.” She smiled. “She was so afraid that you would be too kind to do what had to be done. I told her kindness is not the same as weakness. I think she believed me.”
I opened the sewing room again that fall. Her thread was still sorted by color and her buttons were still in their jars. I cleaned the Singer and oiled it. Mrs. Delaney brought me a pound cake and stayed for tea. I sewed the seam of Mr. Buttons back with thread the same shade as hers, and I tied on a new red bow, a little crooked, because mine was never as neat as hers. When I finished I set him on the rocking chair in the corner, where he belongs.
A little girl lives next door, Lucy, who is eight. One afternoon in October she saw the bear through the window and asked if she could play tea party. I stood there a moment, looking at the glass eye and the red bow. Then I took Mr. Buttons off the chair and put him in her arms. “Careful,” I said. “He is very old. And he has kept more secrets than anyone on this street.” Lucy poured pretend tea into a tiny cup. I swear that the bear looked pleased.
