The hospital smelled of floor wax and lemon pudding. Lewis carried two boxes up to the fourth floor of Mercy like a man delivering a very heavy package, which was his old profession, and I carried the third. Mr. Tolliver lay propped against three pillows, thinner than I had ever seen him, with an oxygen tube under his nose and a young lawyer named Calvin Rhodes in the chair beside him. “There she is,” Amos said, and his voice cracked. “The one person who always did exactly what I told her.” I set the boxes on the rolling table and could not say a single word.
“Twenty two years,” I finally managed. “Every Friday.” Amos waved a shaky hand at the lawyer. “Tell her why.” Mr. Rhodes cleared his throat. “Three years ago Mr. Tolliver came to my office. His son had borrowed against the business twice in Branson and lost both times. He did not want to believe the worst, but he wanted a record nobody could change.” Amos closed his eyes. “A man can be a fool about his own boy, Paulette. He does not have to be a fool in writing.”
We worked until midnight. Mr. Rhodes had the real bank statements for the equipment account, which Amos had quietly asked the bank to mail to Mercy. I read out the dates, and Lewis, perched on a vinyl chair with his glasses low on his nose, found my carbon for every Friday. My carbon for February showed the account exactly where I had left it. Then Mr. Rhodes opened the copy of the green ledger that Bryce had given the bank. “Look at the pages from March on,” he said. Every transfer to Branson was entered there with my initials. But the sevens had no crossbar. I have crossed my sevens since 1979.
Paulette Greer carried twenty two years of secret carbon copies to a hospital room and proved who had really emptied the lumber company account.
At half past midnight the door swung open. Bryce stood there in a golf jacket with his car keys in his fist, and a nurse behind him was saying that visiting hours were long over. He looked at the boxes, at Lewis, at me. “Dad, you are tired and confused,” he said, in the soft voice people use on small children. “Paulette has been telling the bank stories. I am here to take you home.” Lewis stood up slowly. Thirty years of walking up strange driveways had taught him never to look nervous, and he did not.
“I am eighty seven years old, Bryce,” Amos said. His voice was weak, but every word landed like a nail. “I cannot walk to the bathroom alone, but I can still add. Ninety six thousand dollars left the equipment account in eight months. Calvin has the carbons. You told the bank that Paulette took it.” Bryce went the color of the bedsheets. “I was going to put it back.” “A dollar has to be somewhere, Bryce,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Yours were in Branson.”
Mr. Rhodes had already made a phone call. A detective from the Springfield financial crimes unit named Dana Ortiz arrived near one in the morning, in a rumpled raincoat, with a thermos of coffee. She read the carbons under the window lamp, page by page, and when she reached the Friday in March she looked up. “Mrs. Greer, has anyone ever told you that you would make a terrible criminal?” “Why is that?” “You write everything down.” Lewis laughed so hard the nurse looked in. Bryce was asked to step into the hallway, and he left between two officers, past the same nurse who had told him the hour.
By Friday the bank had withdrawn its complaint, restored the accounts it had frozen, and mailed me a letter of apology on thick cream paper. The company in Branson turned out to belong to Bryce and a friend. The money was traced and returned, every dollar, with eleven thousand coming from the sale of a speedboat he had bought in April. Amos sat up in bed to sign the papers that took the business out of the hands of his son. He named me business manager, and he gave every member of the yard crew a share. Homer received the biggest one, and he framed the certificate above the time clock for everyone to see.
I walked back into Tolliver Lumber on a Monday morning in March. The yard crew stood in the break room again, and on the table sat another cake, a big one, with fresh white icing. This one came from a bakery on Commercial Street, and it said “Welcome Back, Paulette” in green letters, the color of a ledger. Homer cut the first slice himself and put it on a real plate. “Forty years I have worked here,” he said, “and I never clapped so hard for anything.” The whole yard clapped, and this time I let myself cry.
The doctors had given Amos a few weeks. Amos had other plans. He went home with a nurse and a bad temper, and every Friday afternoon at four, Lewis drove him to the yard in the Buick. He sat in the office with a blanket over his knees, watching me write the week in a brand new green clothbound ledger, just as he had asked me to years before. Two summers later he is still there, still telling me the coffee is too weak, and he outlived every prediction made over his bed.
I still make a carbon of every page. Lewis says it is a habit, but I know better. It is a promise. Upstairs in the sewing room the old boxes are gone now, filed with the lawyer, and in their place sits fabric for a quilt I have started for Amos, made of squares cut from old Tolliver Lumber aprons. Bryce paid his debt in full, and Homer sends him a Christmas card, which I find generous. As for me, I am sixty six, and I have never felt less confused about the numbers in my life.
