I laid my folder on the table next to the ham and opened it with a little flourish, because I had waited three weeks for this moment and a man of eighty one is entitled to a little flourish. Brittany smiled at me with wet eyes, the pen already uncapped. “Pop,” she said, “you know we only want what is best for you.” I said, “I know that, sweetheart. That is why I brought my own witness.” And I pressed a button on the small gray recorder I had set in the middle of the deviled eggs.
The voice of Brittany filled my dining room. I had recorded it myself, on the third night of my stay at their house, from the guest room, with the recorder that my grandson gave me for Christmas to dictate letters. Mom, it is working. Tom does not have a clue. The old man has ninety thousand dollars in a savings account doing nothing. By Easter it will be ours. He will sign anything if I cry. She laughed. Her mother laughed. Then the voice of Brittany again, bright as a bell: And then a nice place in a home.
Nobody breathed. The recording ran four minutes. When it ended, Tom was staring at his wife. The sister of Tom, Dora, had her hand clasped over her mouth. Brittany, her pen still uncapped, said in a thin voice, “That is not what it sounds like.” I said, “It sounds exactly like a young woman planning to take the savings of an old man.” I turned to my son. “Tom, I am sorry. I should have told you when I heard it. But I did not want to take your marriage from you without proof.”
A man who keeps his hearing aids in at night can hear the whole plot before the pie is cut.
Tom said nothing. His hands lay flat on the tablecloth. He is a quiet man, my son, a surveyor for the county, and he takes a long time to speak. At last he looked at Brittany. “Is it true?” he asked. “Brit, just tell me. Is it true?” She stared at him. Her tears had dried. Something shifted in her face, a mask sliding off. “Oh, Tom,” she said, in a different voice, flat and cool. “You are the sweetest man I ever met, and the dullest. Of course it is true. What did you think I married you for?”
Nobody has ever described to me the sound a heart makes breaking, but I heard it that day. It was my son, drawing in air. I reached across the table and took his arm. Brittany pushed back her chair. She picked up her purse and the folder, and she walked to the front door with her chin lifted. At the threshold she turned. “You will regret this, old man,” she said. “I know people.” I said, “I know a few myself.” And I nodded at the man in the gray suit, who had been quietly eating cake at the end of the table.
He was Detective Ray Salazar of the Cedar Rapids police, a friend of my late wife June from her church choir, and a man I had visited the week before. He stood up and wiped his mouth. “Mrs. Brittany Hollis,” he said, “I have been listening to that recording for ten days. I would like to ask you a few questions about two other men, both elderly, in Iowa and Nebraska. Their families have been asking, too.” She stood there for a long moment in the doorway of my home. Then she put down her purse. And she laughed, a short hard bark, and said, “It was a good run.”
They took her quietly. No handcuffs, no shouting. A deputy drove her away while the neighbors watched from behind curtains. Later I learned that the woman on the phone, her mother, was a friend named Sheryl from Council Bluffs, arrested the same afternoon in a motel in Omaha. The two of them had worked three estates. Brittany pleaded guilty to financial exploitation of vulnerable adults and received six years. The families of the other men wrote me letters. One of them enclosed a pressed flower.
Tom stayed at my house that night. He lay on the sofa with his arm across his eyes, and I sat in my chair, and neither of us spoke for an hour. At last he said, “Dad, how did you stand it? Three weeks, knowing?” I said, “I thought of your mother. She never liked that girl, and she never told me why. I think she saw something in the way Brittany held a fork. Your mother could read people.” He laughed, a damp unsteady laugh. “She could read everyone but you,” he said. “She read me too,” I said. “That is why she married me.”
The ninety thousand dollars never moved. I used a part of it to repair the roof of the house, and another part to buy Tom a better truck, and the rest I put into a trust for the child that Tom and a young woman from the county office are expecting in May. Her name is Amy. She is round and shy and brings casseroles. Yesterday she asked me if she could call me Pop, and I put in my hearing aids to make sure I had heard her correctly. They work just fine, I told her.
On Easter Sunday the next year I hosted again. Ham. Deviled eggs. Coconut cake, from the recipe of June. Tom came with Amy, and Dora came, and the minister, and neighbors from three doors down. After dinner Amy placed a folder in front of me. I flinched for a second, and she laughed. “Do not worry, Pop. It is only a drawing.” Inside was a sketch of an old mailman with a bag, and under it in her tidy hand: For the best grandfather in Iowa. I read it three times. Then I took off my glasses to wipe my eyes.
