Mr. Oberg was a tiny man with big ears and the steady eyes of a clock. He waited until the hall was empty, then pulled me close by the sleeve. “Every night at eleven, the night nurse signs the inventory sheet for every room. It says she counted the belongings. Rings, watches, teeth, glasses. She never counts. She signs on the bottom with a flourish, and the girl Kaylee carries off whatever was not nailed down. The same woman has been signing for seven years. Her name is Pamela Voss.”
He had kept a list. Eighty four years old, with failing eyes, and he kept a list in a spiral notebook hidden inside a magazine. Dates. Names. What was missing. Who had complained and what the staff said. Dentures. A pocket watch. A Purple Heart medal that belonged to a man down the hall who died last winter. I took photographs of every page with my phone and sent them to the officer, whose name was Delgado, before I even left the room.
Officer Delgado came the next morning with a state investigator, a quiet woman in a gray cardigan. They sat with Mr. Oberg for two hours. They asked him to describe Pamela Voss, and he did it without a hitch, down to the color of her coffee mug. They requested seven years of inventory sheets, which the home had to produce under a court order. By evening the sheets were in boxes in the trunk of a state car. And on every one of them, the same swirl of a signature at the bottom.
The unkindest theft is not the one that takes a ring, but the one that tells an old man he only imagined it was ever his.
It turned out the aide was only the small fish. Pamela Voss was something worse. Over seven years she had skimmed the pain medication of dying residents, replacing it with crushed vitamins in the same capsules, and sold the real thing to a man in a truck behind the Walgreens. The inventory sheets were her cover. If a resident complained of a missing ring, she wrote it off as confusion. If a resident complained of pain, she wrote it off as the same. And a young aide with long nails learned the system and stole alongside her.
They arrested Pamela at her house on a Friday. She had a cleaning lady and a boat. The administrator of the home, a smooth man in a gray suit named Mr. Hatch, was placed on leave. He had been told twice, in writing, by two different families, that something was wrong. He had thrown away both letters. The state fined the facility, closed the entire second floor to new residents, and placed an outside monitor in the building. Eleven families received their rings in envelopes at a ceremony in a conference room, and a good many of them wept.
Kaylee pleaded guilty to theft from vulnerable adults. She cooperated, and she got eighteen months. At her sentencing, I read a statement. I did not intend to be kind. But when I saw her in the orange jumpsuit, with her long nails cut short and her hands shaking, I saw a twenty two year old who had never been told no, who learned from a bad teacher in a bad place. I told her I hoped she would use her time to become someone my father could have trusted. She stared at the table. Her shoulders shook.
Dad stayed with me for a month. He slept in the guest room with the old hockey disc on the nightstand, and he woke up at four every morning, sure that practice was starting. I made him coffee and he gave me notes on my driving. By the second week, he was calm. His thumb stopped searching for the ring and began, instead, to rub the little silver signatures on the rubber. He told me one night, clear as glass, that the best team he ever had was the one that lost the game in 1985 and came back to win in 1987.
I found him a new home on the north shore of Lake Superior, small, with twelve residents and a nurse who has been there thirty years. There is a hockey game on the television in the common room every evening in winter. Dad sits in the front row in his old jacket. The aides call him Coach. They knock before they come in. They count the belongings in front of the family, out loud, every month, and everyone signs, including me.
Mr. Oberg came with us. His grandson drove him up, along with the notebook and a suitcase. He has the room next to my father, and the two of them sit on the sunporch in the afternoon and argue about the 1980 Olympic team. I think it is the best thing to come out of this whole terrible affair. Two old men who were wronged, now keeping one another company, with their belongings counted and their dignity intact.
On the Friday in November that would have been their anniversary, I put the ring on his finger again, the real one, returned from the evidence room in a plain envelope. He looked at it for a long time. He said, “Annie.” I did not correct him. I said, “She would be proud of you, Dad.” He nodded. Then he took the disc out of his lap, held it up to the light, and said, as if to a whole bench of kids, “All right, boys. Let us go and play.”
