The policy that my daughter Linda had spoken of on the telephone, when she thought I was out of earshot, turned out to be a life insurance policy on me. I learned it from the agent, a gentle young man named Mr. Reinholt, in his office on Military Avenue in Green Bay, on a gray Wednesday in January. I am Dorothy Kowalski, eighty years old, and I sat in his client chair in my winter coat with my purse on my lap. He turned his computer screen toward me, and said, “Mrs. Kowalski, it was taken out eleven months ago for four hundred thousand dollars.”
I read the screen twice. The owner of the policy was my son in law Gary. The beneficiary was Gary. The signature on the application, which was supposed to be mine, looked like mine in the way a photograph looks like a face, with something quite wrong in the loops. I had never been to a doctor for it. A nurse, Mr. Reinholt said, had come to the house of Linda in the spring. I remembered the visit. Linda had said it was a free wellness check for the senior center. I had held out my arm for her, and I had thanked her.
I had told Linda I was broke. It was a test, the one my husband Stan would have devised, because I had wanted to know, before I left my two point four million dollars to anyone, whether my daughter loved me or only my money. She had closed the door in my face. And on the telephone, afterward, I had heard her say to Gary, in a flat, frightened voice, “If she is broke, the only thing left is the policy.” I had gone home and sat in my chair for two days. Now I understood that she had not been the one who spoke first.
A cold test of a daughter gave one mother the afternoon to bring her family back together in Green Bay.
I gave my terms to Mr. Reinholt across his desk, with my gloved hands folded. “I want that policy cancelled this afternoon, and I want a copy of every paper sent to my own attorney. I want you to call the company and say that the signature is false. And then I am going to drive to the house of my daughter and I am going to knock on the door. If she opens it, I will forgive her. If Gary opens it, I will have the sheriff.” He was already reaching for the telephone, with a look of horror on his young face.
It was Linda who opened it. She stood in the doorway of her kitchen in the gray afternoon, in a stained sweatshirt, with her hair uncombed, and when she saw me she began to weep. “Mother,” she said, “I did not know about the policy until after you came. I swear it on Father. Gary told me that he had the papers, and that if you were truly poor we would need it for your care. I said that sentence because he was standing behind me. He loses at the casino every weekend. I am so afraid of him.” She held out her hands, and I came inside.
Gary was sitting at the kitchen table, in the stale warmth of the furnace, with a mug of coffee and a stack of paper. He rose when he saw me, his face already darkening, and I saw him look at the stack. It was the original policy, the application, and the form he had planned to send to the doctor. He did not say a word. He snatched the whole pile into his arms, shoved past the two of us, and ran for the back door, which opened onto the alley and the snow, with the papers fluttering behind him.
He had not counted on Mr. Okafor. The neighbor, a retired machinist in his seventies, was shoveling the walk behind the house, and when the door burst open and Gary came plunging down the steps with his arms full of paper, he did what any sensible Wisconsin man would do. He leaned on the shovel handle. Gary tripped over it and went headlong into a drift of fresh snow, and the papers flew up in a white and black cloud. Mr. Okafor brushed his hands and said, mildly, “Looks like somebody dropped something.” I stood in the doorway, with Linda trembling against my shoulder, and watched the papers drift down across the yard like a flock of strange birds. Gary sat up in the snow with his hat knocked off, spitting, and for the first time in twelve years of marriage Linda laughed at him. It was a short, cracked laugh. Then she turned and put her face against my coat and sobbed, and I held her, my little girl, forty nine years old, and I smelled the cold air in her hair, and I did not let go.
The money consequences were simple. The company voided the policy and referred the false signature to the district attorney, who charged Gary with fraud and attempted exploitation. Linda filed for divorce, and moved into my house on the east side. I kept my two point four million dollars exactly as it was, and when I made my new will I named Linda as heir, with a trustee, and the condition that the casino accounts of Gary never touch it. Mr. Okafor received a case of my homemade pierogi, which he said was too much.
In the name of Stan, who passed in 2017, I started the Stan Kowalski Fund. It pays for elder legal help, insurance fraud reviews and casino debt counseling for families, in Brown, Outagamie and Door counties. In the first year we reviewed three hundred and twelve policies and found forty three that were false. One was a retired mill worker from De Pere whose son had taken out a policy on him without telling him. When the fund cancelled it, the old man sent us a jar of pickles and a handwritten note.
On a Sunday in March, Linda and I sat in my kitchen with the radio playing polkas and a pan of kolaczki cooling on the stove. She had gone back to church. She had gone to the meetings for families of gamblers. She had taken a job at a bakery, and she smelled of cinnamon. “Mother,” she said, “did you really test me?” I told her I had. She asked me if she had passed. I told her she had passed on the second try, which is better than most of us do.
