I heard the car door slam in the driveway, and I did what Glen had told me to do on the third page of the letter. I folded it small and slid it under the cushion of the couch, and I put my hand on top of the cushion, and I smiled at the front door. I am Marlene Hostetler, seventy nine years old, and I sat in the living room of the house on the north side of Fort Wayne with a walker beside my knee. On the couch beside me sat the young wife, Brittany, pale as milk, and in the kitchen waited her husband, in his Purdue sweatshirt.
Keith came in with the cold on his coat, and one look at the three of us made him stop in the doorway. “Mom, who are these people?” “They bought the recliner,” I said. “They brought a thank you note.” Brittany managed a weak little smile and held her tote bag in her lap with both hands, like a woman holding a baby in a storm. Keith crossed the room in three strides, bent down, and peered into my face. He had the eyes of his father, sharp and brown, and for a moment I wanted to cry, because I knew the third page, and I knew what would happen next.
The third page, in the big careful capitals of Glen, said that Keith had borrowed from men in Indianapolis who were not bankers, that Glen had gone to Sheriff Dale Brandt in April, and that the sheriff and a federal agent had set a plan. The two hundred and twelve thousand dollars was real cash, with every serial number written down. It had been sewn in the chair as bait. When Keith or the men from Indianapolis reached for it, the sheriff would be waiting. Glen had written, Marlene, I am sorry to use our boy this way. It is the only way I know to save him.
A brown recliner sold for forty dollars gave one widow the evening to bring her son home safely to Fort Wayne.
I gave my terms to Keith in the voice I used when he was nine and had broken a window. “Sit down, son. There is a sheriff in this town who has been waiting for you to come to him. You are going to call him now, and tell him everything you owe, and everyone you owe it to. You are going to agree to wear a small microphone when those men come to collect. In return, the sheriff has promised that you will be treated as a witness, and not as a criminal. Your father arranged all of it.”
Keith sagged against the arm of the couch. “Dad knew?” he whispered. “All this time?” “He knew in April,” I said. “He went to the sheriff alone. He told me nothing, because he did not want me to carry it.” Keith began to cry, without any sound, the tears sliding down his stubble and dripping onto the collar of his work jacket, and on the mantel the old clock that Glen wound every Sunday ticked on as if nothing at all had happened. “I am so sorry, Mom. I thought if I just got to Christmas. I took the chair to the garage sale because I knew there was a hundred dollars in the cushion, and I was so desperate.”
It was then that his courage failed him altogether. His eyes fell on the corner of the envelope sticking out from under my hand, and he lunged, snatched it, and bolted for the front door, with the pages crumpling in his fist. He yanked it open. On the porch step stood the young husband, a big boy in his Purdue sweatshirt, who had slipped out of the kitchen through the back. He did not hit Keith. He simply stood in the doorway with his arms folded across the black and gold letters, and Keith bounced off him as if off a wall.
Before Keith could try again, two cars turned into the driveway, one marked, one plain, and the lights came on without a siren. Sheriff Brandt stepped out, a lean white haired man in a campaign hat, followed by a woman in a gray jacket who was clearly the federal agent. Keith froze on the porch. The sheriff came up the steps slowly and said, in a voice as mild as milk, “Keith Hostetler, your father and I have been waiting for this day for six months. Let us go inside and sit down.”
The money consequences were tidy. The men from Indianapolis, who came for their payment the following week and found the sheriff and two deputies waiting, were arrested on the spot, with Keith wired and calm. The cash was returned to the department as evidence, and then released to me in March, every bill accounted for. I put half of it into a fund for the grandchildren and half toward treatment for Keith, who entered a program in Auburn and has not been to French Lick since.
In the name of my husband Glen, who passed in May, I started the Glen Hostetler Fund. It pays for counseling for people with gambling troubles, and for legal help for older adults caught in family money problems, in Allen, DeKalb and Whitley counties. In the first year we placed thirty seven people in counseling and helped twenty two older adults protect their savings. One was a retired machinist from Churubusco who had been giving his nephew his Social Security check without a word.
Last Christmas, Keith came home to the north side with a bag of oranges and a sugar cream pie from the Lutheran ladies. The young couple from the recliner, Brittany and Cody, came by with their new baby, and we all squeezed into the living room. In the corner, where the recliner used to stand, there was a plain wooden rocking chair that Keith had made in the program. He tested it with a hand on the arm. “For you, Mom,” he said. I sat down, and it rocked, easily, forward and back.
