I read the letter of Irene standing in the church hallway under a framed picture of Martin Luther, with Pastor Lindgren beside me and the smell of frying perch drifting down the corridor. It was written on her blue stationery in the neat Palmer hand that taught me to love penmanship. Dear Walt. If you are reading this, I am gone, and Kathy has done what I feared. She is not the one to worry about. She is a worrier, not a thief. The one to watch is Gary Voss. Go to the First National in Allouez and open box forty seven. Bring Pastor Lindgren. Do not go alone.
I turned the page over. On the back, in smaller letters, she had written the rest. In 2018, the year before she passed, Irene had gone through the books of the lanes for the sale and found that more than a hundred forty thousand dollars had gone missing over six years. She had traced it, line by line, in pencil, to a bookkeeping service run by the man who now served as treasurer of St. Pauls. Gary Voss, certified public accountant, deacon, a man who shook my hand every Sunday. She had made a copy of every page. She had put it in a box. She had put the key in an envelope.
The pastor sat down on a bench. He said that he had held the envelope for six years and had sworn to Irene that he would give it to me only if Kathy ever tried to take over my accounts. Today, with Kathy at the microphone and Gary Voss beside her with a legal pad, he had known the time had come. I folded the letter along its old creases. I looked down the hall at the doors of the fellowship hall, where two hundred people were lining up with paper plates. I said, “Pastor, we have a bank to visit. After that, we have a fish fry.”
A blue stickered envelope and a key numbered forty seven gave one bowling alley owner the length of a single fish fry to bring his daughter back to the truth in Green Bay.
I gave my terms to the pastor in the parking lot. We would drive to the First National before it closed at four, the two of us, with the key numbered forty seven. We would open the box in front of a bank officer. We would carry what we found back to the church basement, and I would ask Kathy, in front of the whole congregation, to tell me what she had known. I did not want my daughter shamed. I wanted her heard. The pastor opened the door of his Buick for me, and I climbed in with the key held in my fist like a good luck charm.
The box held a thick brown folder and a bowling pin, a tiny one, painted blue. The folder was a ledger, with Irene handwriting down every column and a note in red pencil at the bottom of each page. I cried a little in the vault, and the officer politely looked at the ceiling. We were back at St. Pauls by five thirty. Kathy was in the kitchen in an apron, ladling coleslaw, and when I put the folder on the steel counter she looked at it, and at me, and at the pastor. “Dad,” she said, “I thought you were being cheated. I wanted to protect you. Gary said you were slipping.”
Gary Voss was at the end of the serving line, in a sweater vest, with a plate of perch and a smile that dimmed by degrees. I said his name aloud, and the buzz of the hall dropped away. I held up the ledger. “Gary,” I said, “Irene found it in 2018.” He did not wait for the rest. He snatched the ledger from my hands, meaning to hurry out through the kitchen to the loading dock and into his Lexus, and he plunged through the swinging door past the fryers with the folder held against his chest like a football.
He ran straight into the Lutheran Women. Seventeen of them, in aprons and hairnets, lined up at the stainless steel counter, each one holding a ladle or a spatula or a pan of cold slaw. They had heard everything. They did not move. Dolores Kuehn, who had run the church kitchen since 1971, held a long fish spatula at the level of his belt. “Gary,” she said, “we have a policy about leaving with our food.” Gary stopped. The ledger slid from his arms and landed on the tile with a sound like applause. Someone, out in the hall, began to clap.
The police were polite, and the bank was more helpful than I expected. Gary Voss repaid what the court could recover, one hundred thirty one thousand dollars, and went before a judge in Brown County. Kathy resigned from the finance committee and drove up to my house on a Tuesday with her husband and her two grown children. She knelt by my chair. She said she had been so afraid of being the daughter who did nothing that she had become the daughter who did too much. I told her there was a middle, and that I would show her where it was.
In the name of Irene, who passed in 2019, I started the Irene Jablonski Fund. It pays for league fees, rental shoes and bus rides to the lanes for children and seniors who cannot afford a game, in Brown, Outagamie and Oconto counties. In the first year we filled forty one lanes with seven hundred bowlers. A girl of seven named Brynn, in a pair of red rental shoes two sizes too large, threw a ball down the gutter, then another, then bowled a seven. She turned to the whole alley with her arms in the air. Nobody in the building was sitting down.
Every Friday night, Kathy and I bowl a game at a lane in Green Bay, the second from the end, which is the one I picked for the family in 1962. She is a terrible bowler. She throws the ball like a bag of laundry. I keep the little blue pin from the box on the scoring table, beside the pencil. When she finally threw a strike last month, the pins crashed down, and she turned to me with a face I had not seen since she was nine, and I said, “Irene would have called that a Kathy.” We laughed until the pins reset.
