The father of Hannah is a surveyor named Peter Gagnon, and he reads a deed the way other men read a menu. He sat at the little dining table with the paper held in both hands and went through it line by line, moving his lips slightly. Then he went back to the top and read it a second time. “Green Mountain Holdings, LLC,” he said. “Managing member, Inge Larsen. Closing date, October fourteenth.” He set it down. “Mrs. Larsen, you own this condominium. The walls. The ceiling. The table we are sitting at, practically.” He looked at Erik. “Did you know that?”
Erik had turned the color of skim milk. He is forty five, a lean man with thinning blond hair and the long Larsen jaw, and he stood by the window of the condo, with his arms crossed over a quarter zip pullover, as though he were cold. “Mom, the landlord told me the building was sold,” he said. “He said the new owners would raise the rent. I did not know it was you.” “I know you did not,” I said. “I wanted to see what you would do when you thought I had nothing.”
I put my hand into my coat and took out the key to the Subaru. It was on its old ring, with the little plastic dog groomer I had won at a trade show. “Erik, you sold my car for fourteen thousand five hundred dollars. You gave me six thousand. You told me the dealer had cheated us both.” I laid the key on the table. “The dealer sent me the bill of sale. And then I called the casino, and the casino told me what my debit card did over two nights in September. Twenty one thousand dollars.” Hannah put her hand over her mouth and made a sound like a sob.
A Subaru key lay on a condo dining table beside a deed and gave one dog groomer the evening to bring her son back from the casino.
My son stood quite still. Then he let his arms fall to his sides, and it was as though the stuffing had gone out of him. “I was going to win it back,” he said. “That is how it goes. You lose a little, and you think, I will make it up on the next hand. And the next hand costs more.” His voice was thin. “I did not take the card for me, Mom. I took it for the man who thought he could fix everything. He is gone now. I do not know when he left.” He turned to Hannah. “I should have told you.”
Hannah is thirty six, a dental hygienist with a steady, level look. She did not cry again. She looked at Erik for a long time. “I knew about the casino,” she said. “I did not know about the card. I did not know about the car.” She turned to me. “Mrs. Larsen, did you ask me to come tonight so I would hear it?” “I did,” I said. “You deserved to hear it before you married him.” Erik made a small noise. “I am not telling you what to do, Hannah. I am telling you what is true.”
Peter Gagnon cleared his throat. “Mrs. Larsen, if I may. In my experience, a man who has found the bottom has two choices. He can stay down there. Or he can use it as a floor.” He looked at Erik with the patience of a surveyor. “Your mother has just offered you the second option, whether or not she knows it. She bought your building. She could have let a stranger have it.” I said that was exactly right. I had not planned to say anything so tidy, but I let it stand.
I told Erik the terms. He would go to the counselor on Monday, a woman at the hospital in Rutland who ran a group for people who gamble. He would give me the passwords to every account, and I would sit with him once a week, over coffee. He would sign the casino self exclusion form that very night, in the kitchen, with Peter Gagnon as witness. He would repay what he had taken, out of his pay at the lumber yard, a little at a time. “And the condo,” I said, “is yours. In a year. If you keep your word. I will sell it to you at what I paid, and not a cent more.”
He sobbed. He is a large man and he sobbed like a child, with his whole chest. Hannah let him. She sat very straight in her chair, and I could see that she was weighing it, the whole of it, the man who had lied and the man in front of her who was undone. In the end she reached across the table and took his wrist. She did not squeeze it. She only held it, as one holds something one has not yet decided to keep.
Erik signed the form at the kitchen counter. Peter Gagnon witnessed it with a pen from his shirt pocket, in a square surveyor hand. The next morning my son was in the hospital waiting room at seven thirty. He went on Mondays for a year. He came to my house on Thursdays and we sat on the porch and did the crossword, he doing the long answers, I the short, and every few weeks he showed me a statement with a column that was growing smaller. I did not say anything. I put my pencil down and looked at the mountains.
A year and a day later I drove to the condo. In my pocket was the old ring with the little plastic dog groomer, which I had kept. Erik stood in the doorway. I handed him an envelope with the deed in it, in his name, and the ring on top. “The car is gone,” I said. “But you may keep the dog.” He laughed and cried at once. Behind him, in the living room, Hannah was setting the table. She looked up and smiled, and in the window the first snow of the year began to fall on Rutland.
