Travis Dunn laughed again, but the laugh was a dead thing. “Brenda, whatever you think you know,” he said, “you need to understand that my father made me do it.” His wife stepped away from him as if he were hot to the touch. Karen was a plain, tired woman in a quilted jacket, and she had stood beside him for thirty years at the cash register of that hardware store. “Do what, Travis?” she said, very softly. The whole of Main Street was listening, the marching band with their trumpets lowered, the Boy Scouts in their sashes, a man in a Santa suit holding a thermos.
He looked at me, and he looked at the crowd, and something gave way behind his eyes. Travis had been the golden boy of Harlan, captain of the football team and the son of the man who owned the hardware store. He was fifty eight years old now, with a big belly and thinning hair. “It was Daddy,” he said. “In 1989 the store was behind. The bank was calling the loan. Daddy took two thousand four hundred dollars from the safe to cover a check and told me to say that I saw Brenda do it. I was nineteen. I did what I was told.”
The crowd made a sound like wind in dry corn. I stood by the car with the folder in my hand and my heart beating slowly, steadily, the way it had in the Army before a convoy. I had imagined that sentence for thirty seven years. I had imagined it in the barracks in Kentucky, in Kuwait, in a Humvee in Iraq. I had imagined hearing it in a courtroom. I had never once imagined it on a cold Saturday in December, with a high school marching band tuning behind us, and Travis weeping in a vinyl jacket.
A girl who is called trash by a whole town can still grow up to hold the only folder that matters.
“And the money in your truck?” I asked. I kept my voice quiet. “Three weeks later, Travis. The deputy found the money in the glove compartment of your pickup.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his glove. “Daddy put it there,” he said. “He panicked when the bank examiner came. He needed the money to be found somewhere that was not his office. He told me to keep my mouth shut and let it blow over. By then you were gone. Brenda, I swear to God, I did not think it would follow you for your whole life.”
Then I opened the folder and read the rest of it. The sworn statements from four former employees of Dunn Hardware, each one dated within the last month, described the same pattern. For twenty six years the store had withheld retirement contributions from the paychecks of its workers and never deposited them. The books showed a pension fund that existed on paper and nowhere else. It had begun with his father, who died in 2004. It had continued with his son. The total, according to the forensic accountant I had hired in October, came to six hundred and eleven thousand dollars.
Karen sat down on the curb. She put her head in her hands and said something I did not hear. The deputy standing beside me, a young man named Corey, touched my elbow. “Sheriff?” he said. I nodded. I did not want to do it in front of a crowd, but Travis had made that choice for us. I walked to him slowly and said, “Travis Lee Dunn, I am placing you under arrest for theft by deception, embezzlement, and falsifying business records. You have the right to remain silent.” He held out his wrists himself. I did not put the cuffs on tight.
He pleaded guilty in February. At the sentencing, the judge, an elderly woman who had known my mother, read out each of the counts in turn and gave him seven years, with restitution to every employee. Travis stood in front of the bench in a suit that no longer fit him. When the judge asked if he wished to say anything, he turned halfway and found me in the gallery. “I am sorry, Brenda,” he said. “It was never about the money. I was a coward. I was a coward every day of my life.” I did not answer. But I did not look away.
The state of Kentucky formally cleared my name in April. A clerk handed me the document in a manila envelope, and I carried it down the courthouse steps and out into the spring light. It said that the record of the arrest of Brenda Marie Calloway in 1989 had been expunged and that the charge was withdrawn with prejudice. I sat on the bench outside and read it twice. My mother died in 2008, and she never saw it. I held the paper up to the sky anyway, in case she was looking.
That Sunday I went to church for the first time since I was nineteen. The sanctuary at First Baptist was full. Some of the same church ladies who had whispered about me in 1989 were in the pews, thirty seven years older, with white hair and walkers. One of them, a woman named Doris, rose from her seat and came across the aisle with tears in her eyes. “Brenda,” she said, “I said terrible things about your mother.” I took her hands. “Doris,” I said, “my mother used to say that grace is just another word for second chance. Sit down, and let me hear you sing.”
The four workers, with the help of a lawyer from legal aid, bought the hardware store from the bankruptcy court that summer for one dollar and the assumption of its debts. They renamed it River Road Hardware, in my honor, which I told them was unnecessary and secretly loved. They give a discount to every veteran. The window now displays a small sign that reads, UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP, THE PEOPLE WHO WORK HERE. On opening day, I cut the ribbon with a pair of bolt cutters, and the whole street cheered.
In December, for the next Christmas parade, I rode again in the lead car with the window down. The crowd along Main Street was larger than the year before, and every face turned toward me. Children ran alongside waving paper stars. I threw peppermints from my window and, at the corner of River Road, a small girl in a red coat caught one and shouted, “Sheriff Calloway, are you a real sheriff?” I stopped the car. I leaned out the window. “Honey,” I said, “I am the realest one in Kentucky.”
