There were two of them. The dying woman was Carol, who’d been his bookkeeper in 2013, and the name he flinched toward was Marianne, who had been something else entirely and much more recent. He gave me Marianne in about ninety seconds because he assumed she was what Carol was calling about, and by the time he understood she wasn’t, he’d already handed me a year I hadn’t known to ask about. I let him finish. Then I said the word hospice and watched him sit down on the arm of the couch like his knees had quit. He said, “Carol’s sick?” — not what did Carol say, not yet — and I gave him about four seconds of being a decent man before he ruined it with, “What exactly is she planning to tell you?”
Carol told me on a Thursday, in pieces, with the oxygen going. It wasn’t a woman at all. In 2013 he’d moved money out of the business — sixty-one thousand over nine months — out of an account belonging to his partner Ray’s widow, who’d trusted them both and never once looked at a statement. Carol found it, and he cried in her office and promised he’d put it back, and she gave him a year. He put back eleven thousand. Then he sold his share, and Ray’s widow moved to Florida on what was left, and Carol carried it because she had two kids in school and no other job in that town. She said, “I let him make me part of it.” She was seventy-four and apologizing to me, and I told her to stop, and she said she’d already written it out and signed it and her daughter had a copy.
He’s not in jail. The statute ran out years ago and the widow died in 2021, and I’ve made my peace with the fact that there is no courtroom in this story. What there is: a letter, and a daughter in Ohio who has it, and me. I told him I wasn’t going to be the third person who kept it for him. He asked what I wanted him to do, and I said that wasn’t my job anymore. He wrote to Ray’s son in the spring — a real letter, four pages, the number in it plain — and the son never answered, which is his right. Carol died in March. I drove up for the service and sat in the back, and her daughter found me afterward and said her mother had slept through the night for the first time in eleven years, the night after we talked.
