The man who climbed out of the Buick in my driveway was Walter Prochaska, who had drawn up the papers of Kowalczyk Glass in 1984, with white hair now and a leather briefcase worn soft as a glove. He walked across the lawn in his church shoes, past the oak tree and the picnic table of the parents of Courtney, and nodded to me at the garage door as if we had agreed to meet. “Beverly, I am sorry I am late,” he said. “Ed asked me to come on the day you called, and to bring this. He told me you would know the day.”
He opened the briefcase on the workbench of Ed, between the vise and the coffee can of washers. Inside lay a sealed envelope with my name on it, and a bound will. Matt stood frozen in the garage door with his arms hanging. “Mrs. Kowalczyk, your husband amended the trust in the spring of 2021,” the lawyer said. “The shares of the company that Matt holds are held subject to your consent. If Matt transfers, pledges or sells them without your written approval, they revert to you, automatically, and any lender who relied on them is out of luck.” He looked at Matt over his glasses. “Your father told me you would be tempted. He hoped you would not be.”
I opened the envelope with my thumbnail. It was one page, in the slanting hand of Ed. “Bev, if you are reading this, Matt has done something foolish and you have found it out,” he wrote. “Do not be too hard on him. He is soft where I was hard. But do not let anyone take the shop. I built it with your hands as much as mine.” I read it, and put it down, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. Matt had gone white to the lips. Behind him, Jim stood at the garage door with the hot dog hanging from his fingers like a limp mouse.
A paper plate carried to a garage workbench gave one grandmother the afternoon to bring her son back to the glass shop in Toledo.
I set my terms standing at the workbench, in the voice I had once used on the line of installers. “Matt, you will give back every key and password tonight. You will tell Jim and his lawyer that nothing in this company is pledged to anyone. And you will start work Monday morning on the install crew under Marty, at the pay of a first year installer, riding in the van.” Jim swelled up and came forward with the hot dog still in his fist. “Beverly, this is a family matter, and I will not be ordered around in front of my grandson,” he said. “I have a loan with this company as collateral.” I looked at him. “Then you made a bad loan, Jim.”
Courtney had been standing behind her husband all this time with her hands over her mouth. Now she spoke, in a small, tight voice, as if the words were being pulled out with pliers. “Bev, I did not know about the email,” she said. “I thought it was just the paper. I thought it was for Matt.” She looked at the paper plate, still in her fingers, and her cheeks went red as the ketchup. “I put you in the garage. In your own house. At your own party.” The plate began to shake. She put it down on the workbench, very carefully, on top of the will. “I am so ashamed.”
Jim saw that the game was over and lunged for the door of his Mercedes, with his phone out, and his keys in his hand. He meant to be at the bank on Monroe Street before the closing bell, I suppose, to call the loan before it could be taken from him. But the van of Marty Novak was already across the end of my driveway, nose to the curb, with the engine running. Marty climbed down in his work boots, all six foot four of him, and folded his arms. “Mr. Anders, I believe you are blocked in,” he said politely. “Would you come back and have a hamburger?”
Matt stood at the grill after everyone had gone quiet, with the spatula in his hand and his back to me. The burgers were burned. He was forty one years old, a big man gone soft around the middle, and his shoulders were shaking. “Mom, I wanted to be the man Dad was,” he said, without turning around. “I thought if I could bring in the Detroit dealers, I would be a real boss, and not just his boy.” I took the spatula out of his hand and set it on the shelf. “Matthew, your father was never ashamed of you. He was ashamed of himself for not telling you so.”
The money consequences were quick. the loan of Jim collapsed within a week, since the bank could not call a pledge that had never been valid, and his Detroit glass company filed for bankruptcy protection in the spring. Matt worked the install crew for two years, in the van with Marty, learning to cut tempered glass by hand. At the end of it, I made him foreman, then vice president again, with a vote that required my signature. Every dealer in Findlay and Fremont came back to Kowalczyk Glass. We signed a new contract with the biggest dealer in Ohio on the day of the Mud Hens opener.
In the name of my husband, Ed, who passed in 2021 and who cut his first windshield at nineteen, I started the Glass Cutter Fund. It pays for legal help, succession planning and counseling for older family business owners in Lucas, Wood and Ottawa counties whose own children are pushing them out. In the first year, we helped thirty seven owners. A woman of seventy two, with flour on her sleeve, sat in the office and said, “My son says I should retire to the garage.” I told her I knew that garage. I told her to keep the key.
In June, we held the Little League banquet in the backyard again. I made the baked beans and the potato salad, the deviled eggs and the sheet cake shaped like a baseball diamond. Courtney came at noon, with her own folding chairs, and set the head of the picnic table with a cloth, and pulled out a chair for me under the oak tree. Matt carried the first plate to me from the grill, with a deviled egg on the side. My grandson ran up and put an old baseball mitt in my lap. “Grandma, it belonged to Grandpa,” he said. “It still smells like him.”
