“Personally known,” I said. “So it was somebody who knew you. I was standing at my father’s grave when that pen moved.”
He looked at the page a long time. Then, “You’re tired, Del. You’ve been up since five for three years.”
I drove to my mother’s with the copy in my coat. She read it at the table, then took her glasses off and held them.
“He told me you’d agreed,” she said. “That you were worn out and wanted out and couldn’t say it to my face. He said all he needed was my signature so the papers would look right.”
“Three weeks,” I said. “You could have asked me. One phone call.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.” She set the glasses down. “I’ll come Saturday. I’ll sign my fifth back to you in front of whoever’s there. And you can hate me after.”
Saturday the dining room was full at seven. Ninety covers, a wedding party from Halstead who had booked in February for the pea dish. I had cooked all day on borrowed onions. At half past eight I came out of the kitchen with the green ledger under my arm and stood at the pass, and the room went quiet in the way a room does when a chef walks out with paper instead of plates.
I read them the margin notes. The twelfth of March, forty pounds of onions, after the rebrand. The ninth of April, after the rebrand. I read the date the registration was filed, three weeks before my key stopped working in my own door. I read the date on the bank’s signature card, the 2:15 in the notary journal, and the name of the notary, which was his mother’s name before she married, a man I had met twice at Christmas and who had never once asked my name.
“He wrote it thirty-one times,” I said. “There was never going to be an after.”
The investigator from the district attorney’s fraud unit had been at the end of the bar since eight, turning a lanyard over in her fingers. She stood up. Two deputies came in from the street and went along the wall past the coat hooks, and Theo put his hands flat on the table and said, “Del. Tell them.”
I handed her the folder I had been keeping in the office safe, and the ledger on top of it.
They let him get his own coat. He walked out past his sign with his hands cuffed behind him and the whole room watched, and one man at the back took a photograph with his phone, and I have never once been sorry about that.
The rest took weeks. The registration was voided and so was the loan, the licence went back in my name, and Theo was barred from the building and from filing for a licence anywhere in the county. My mother signed her fifth back to me at the bar before the room had emptied, and her name came off the file that week. Theo pleaded guilty to second-degree forgery in October. The flat was in his own name and the lease went with the conviction. I posted the rings back to his sister and lost the deposit on the hall, two thousand dollars I did not have.
The district attorney gave me the agreement on a Wednesday and I read it twice before I signed. Seventy-five thousand in restitution, three years’ probation, no prison. The investigator told me what I already knew. A man in prison does not have sixty-one thousand dollars.
So I took the deal. My staff called it a payoff. My mother called it mercy, which is the closest she has come to saying she was wrong. I stopped defending either one.
Sunil was paid in full on the second of December. He wrote PAID across the last page in the same pencil and then sat in the dining room, for the first time in twenty-five years, and ate the pea dish.
On the Sunday before Christmas I took the little brush out of the drawer and the pot of gold paint and did the sign myself, standing on the ladder in the cold. The Copper Ladle, in the same copper letters my father cut, and nothing under it. No Kitchen and Bar. No and Company.
When I finished I stood back on the pavement and looked at it a while, then went in and lit the ovens, because there were eighty covers on Monday and the bread had to go in.
