I looked at the text from Kenji and I did not blink. Pan Am trained me to read a cabin full of people and know in a glance which one was about to cause trouble. Patrick was on his feet, red faced, with his hand on the back of the chair. Mrs. Dunn, in her pink cardigan, had gone a strange gray color. And Mr. Foley, the notary, stood very straight in the hallway door with his briefcase held in front of him like a shield. “Patrick,” I said sweetly, “who is the other aunt in Clearwater?” He said I was confused. He said it with such force that his voice cracked.
Captain Ron stood up from the sofa. He is eighty seven, but when he stands in that old captain jacket, with four gold stripes on his sleeve, he is six feet tall and the whole room knows it. “Young man, I have flown ninety thousand hours,” he said in a quiet voice. “I know a man who is lying when I see one. Sit down.” Patrick sat. Mr. Foley, to my surprise, set his briefcase on my coffee table and opened it. “Mrs. Walsh, I came here tonight in good faith,” he said. “I would like to leave in good faith. May I show you what your nephew gave me?”
He took out a stamped file. It held a signed statement from a physician in Tampa, dated the week before, declaring that I had advanced dementia. There was a second paper, a letter from the Sunrise Gardens Memory Care Center, offering me a room. And a third, a bill of sale for my condominium, to a company I had never heard of, for ninety thousand dollars, a quarter of its value. “Mrs. Walsh, the doctor does not exist,” Mr. Foley said. “I called the Florida Board of Medicine from my car. The license number is invented. I am so sorry I did not call before.”
A fake blue and white envelope, a captain in a four stripe jacket, and a flight attendant who poured champagne for the wrong crew.
Mrs. Dunn rose, clutching her clipboard, and began to edge toward the door. Captain Ron stepped in front of it. “Mrs. Dunn, you will stay until the police arrive,” he said. I took out my telephone and called the St. Pete Beach police, whose chief, Rich Bellamy, I had once helped through a very rough flight to Frankfurt in 1989, and who had never forgotten it. “Rich, I have a small boarding problem in my living room,” I said. “Three guests who would like to leave before they have signed in.” Rich laughed. Then he said he was already on his way.
While we waited, I poured champagne. I had promised the captain, and Pan Am never breaks a promise. I served a glass to Mr. Foley, who accepted it with a bow, and one to the captain, who clinked it against mine, and one, very carefully, to Patrick, who stared at it as though it might bite. “Drink, Patrick,” I said. “You came here for a toast.” He took it. His hand was shaking so badly that champagne splashed on my carpet. “Aunt Eileen, I am drowning,” he whispered. “I owe a lot of money, and I thought you would never need it.”
The police arrived in four minutes. Chief Bellamy and two officers took Mrs. Dunn, who gave her real name in the first sentence, and who had in her purse a stack of identical forms for six other women in Pinellas County. They took Patrick, gently, because he did not resist. I stood in the doorway in my pillbox hat and watched them go. My nephew, my only family, in handcuffs, in my hallway, with the fake Pan Am envelope sticking out of his jacket pocket. I did not cry. I put my hand to my heart and said a short prayer for my sister.
The woman in Clearwater was Marjorie Pruitt, eighty one, a retired schoolteacher, my late sister best friend, whom Patrick had also called aunt. Kenji had called her himself after the police left. She had received her envelope the same morning, and she had been about to sign. When the officers arrived at her door with a warning, she put her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh, I almost did.” I drove to Clearwater the next day with a bag of Kenji sushi, and Marjorie and I sat on her lanai and ate and laughed until we cried, two old women who had nearly been robbed.
The state charged Patrick with attempted exploitation of an elder, forgery, and conspiracy. At the sentencing I asked the judge to be merciful. He received eighteen months of house arrest, restitution and a requirement to work a second job. He called me on a Sunday in March. “Aunt Eileen, I did not deserve a second chance,” he said. I said that nobody does, and that is why they call it grace. He asked if he could come to Thanksgiving. I said he might, if he brought a pie, and if he did not talk about money once.
He brought a pecan pie, store bought, with the price sticker still on the lid. We laughed about it. We ate in the dining room, with the Pan Am china, and Captain Ron said grace, and Marjorie told a story about my sister at twelve years old, and Patrick listened, rapt, with his fork poised. At the end of the meal he stood up, awkward, and raised a glass of apple cider. “To Aunt Eileen,” he said. “The flight has not landed. I am sorry I ever said it.” Everyone cheered. I raised my glass, and I found I did not have a single word.
On Monday I rolled my cart up to the sushi counter at the Publix on Gulf Boulevard. Kenji was slicing salmon with the long thin knife. “Mrs. Walsh,” he said, with a deep bow. “California roll, extra ginger?” I looked at the case, at the pink rolls and the white rice and the glossy black strips of eel in the corner. I had walked past them for six years. I put my hand on the glass. “Kenji,” I said, “I would like to try the eel.” And he smiled so widely that his eyes disappeared, and he said, “At last.”
