I read the first page of the notebook on the porch step in my bathrobe, in the cold, with the key in my left hand. In 1986, Frank wrote, Patrolman Dennis Kerrigan, Eighth District, took twenty thousand dollars from the evidence locker at the station on Chicago Avenue to pay a gambling debt. I caught him at it. I did not report it. I made him sit in my kitchen and tell me why. He cried. He was twenty six, with a pregnant wife. Walt Brennan stood below me on the walk with his hands in his pockets. “Mary Kate,” he said, “I was in the room that night. Frank did the right thing.”
The next pages were a list. Frank had written the names of nine men, over twenty years, whom he had caught in some small or large trouble, and given a second chance. Beside each name, in his square hand, he had written the amounts they paid back, and the dates. Dennis Kerrigan had paid every cent of the twenty thousand dollars, in cash envelopes, in the mailbox of our house, over fourteen years, and Frank had written PAID IN FULL, 2001. Then, at the bottom, Frank had added a line in a different pen. He raised a good daughter. I will never tell Rob. But Mary Kate should know.
The key opened a safe deposit box at the Standard Bank on Cicero Avenue, which Walt and I visited at ten o clock that morning, the bank having opened for a special favor. In the box, in the lining of a sock, was the evidence that Frank had kept, a photocopy of the report he had never filed. And an envelope with nineteen thousand dollars in bills and a note. Mary Kate, this is what Dennis paid, and what I never spent. Use it for yourself. Do not give it to Rob. Buy something nice. Buy something green. I sat on a bank chair and laughed and cried at once.
A brown paper package and an old police notebook gave one retired school secretary the length of a single morning to bring her son back to the truth in Oak Lawn.
I gave my terms to Walt in the parking lot. I did not want revenge, I told him. I wanted a seat at the table. I would invite Rob and Courtney, and her parents, to my house on the afternoon of the twenty sixth for what was left of the roast, and I would put out the good plates. I would not say a word about the notebook unless I had to. Walt grinned under his gray mustache. “Mary Kate,” he said, “Frank would have bought the beer.” I told him Frank would have eaten the leftover Yule log and said it was better the second day.
They came at three, in two cars. Rob carried a bottle of wine, and Courtney carried nothing, and her father Dennis Kerrigan came last, a heavy white haired man in a camel coat, leaning on a cane. He looked at the table, set with my mother silver, and at the platter of cold beef, and at me. Then he saw Frank notebook lying beside my plate, closed. He stopped in the doorway with his mouth open. “Mary Kate,” he said, in a husky voice, “is that what I think it is?” I said, “Dennis, it is the receipt.”
Dennis sat down heavily at my table and told it all himself, in a voice that shook. The debt, the locker, the money, Frank. How Frank had never held it against him. How he had built a business, and a family, and a house in Orland Park, and had spent forty years trying to be the man Frank saw. “I should have been kinder to you,” he said, to me. “I let Courtney put you in the kitchen. I said grace over your roast and I did not say your name.” Courtney had gone white. She snatched the notebook off the table, meaning to run out through the kitchen and into the garden and put it in the trash.
She flung open my back door and ran across the patio and down the garden path, past the statue of St. Francis, to the little wooden gate at the end of the yard. She seized the latch. It would not move. Frank had been meaning to fix it since 1994, and it stuck in the cold as it had stuck every winter, so that nobody could get through without a hard lift and a knack. Courtney rattled it. She pulled. She pushed. A sparrow on the shoulder of St. Francis watched her with its head tilted. Then, slowly, she sat down on the garden bench and put her head in her hands.
I walked down the path in my slippers and sat beside her. “Courtney,” I said, “you called me smelly because you were afraid of what I knew. You never needed to be.” She said, “Mary, I did not know about the notebook. I only knew my father was ashamed of something.” I took the notebook gently from her lap. “Your father,” I said, “paid back every cent. He is the best man on that list.” She looked up. Her mascara had run. “Does Rob know?” she asked. I said, “Rob will know what we tell him. We can start with Christmas.”
In the name of Frank, who passed in 2021, I started the Second Chance Fund. It pays for tool kits, work boots and a first month of rent for men and women leaving the county jail who want to work, in Cook, Will and DuPage counties. In the first year we gave a fresh start to one hundred twelve people. A man of fifty named Leo, out after eight years, held a pair of steel toe boots in his hands and said he had not known anyone had left a pair for him. I said that someone had.
This past Christmas Eve, I cooked the roast at my own house in Oak Lawn, with twelve people at my table, and Rob carved. Courtney sat at my left. Dennis Kerrigan said grace, and this time he began, “For Mary Kate, who fed us, and for Frank, who saw us.” We ate in the green velvet and the gold watch, which I wear tight now on a new band. After the Yule log, Rob stood up with a glass and said that he had been wrong about the stool. I told him to sit down. I said that his father would have been proud.
