Chapter 5 - THE SON’S RECKONING
The sun had finally broken through the overcast at four o'clock, but it was that low, dying autumn light that offers no heat, only long, skeletal shadows across the grass.
Margaret found Daniel in the garage.
The garage had been Arthur’s domain. Along the western wall, Arthur’s tools still hung from their white-painted silhouettes on the pegboard: the ball-peen hammers, the crescent wrenches, the hand saws with their teeth kept sharp by grease and cedar shavings. Above the workbench, a small black-and-white photograph of Arthur in his Navy dungarees hung in a cheap tin frame, the glass covered in a fine skin of dried motor oil.
Daniel was sitting on a plastic lawn chair, holding an unopened can of beer between his thighs. He didn't have his phone out. He was staring at the floor, where a pile of old cedar shingles had rotted into mulch behind the snowblower.
Margaret didn't turn on the overhead bulb. She came in through the side door, her boots dragging slightly on the concrete, and leaned against the edge of the workbench next to the vise.
"She spent seventy thousand dollars, Daniel," Margaret said.
Daniel didn't jump. He didn't even look up. He just let his head drop lower, his chin resting against the collar of his flannel shirt.
"I know," he said.
"Where did it go?"
"The developer," Daniel whispered. "The guy in New Albany. He had five lots near the new Intel plant. He said if we didn't have the reservation fee by Friday, he was giving them to a group from Chicago. She... she told me we were using her sister’s line of credit."
"You knew she didn't have a line of credit," Margaret said. "Her sister’s boutique went into Chapter Seven two years ago."
"I wanted to believe her, Mom!" Daniel’s voice came up now, thick with grease and phlegm, the sound he used to make when he had failed an algebra test and sat on the basement stairs waiting for Arthur to come home from the shop. "I’m thirty-eight years old! Thirty-eight! I’ve been laid off twice in four years. Every guy I went to high school with has a house in Powell or a cottage up at Catawba, and I’m sleeping in my childhood bedroom with my wife telling me I’m a failure every time I turn the ignition on a car we can't afford!"
Margaret looked at Arthur’s ball-peen hammer on the pegboard. She remembered Arthur coming home in 1980 with his boots soaked in cutting oil, his hands so stiff from the cold that she had to unlace them for him over the floor register.
"Your father worked fourteen hours a day when the mill went on strike," she said, her voice dropping down into the wood of the bench. "He didn't steal his mother’s kitchen table to buy five lots in New Albany."
"She said it wasn't stealing! She said the house was going to us anyway! She said it was just... accelerating the distribution. She had the documents drawn up by a service. She said everybody does it. She said people in Upper Arlington do it all the time to avoid the inheritance taxes."
"This isn't Upper Arlington, Daniel," Margaret said. "This is Elmwood Drive. This house was built with money your grandfather saved out of his disability check after he took shrapnel at Saint-Lô. It was kept with the money Arthur earned with three ruptured discs in his lower back. It doesn't belong to a developer in New Albany. It belongs to me. And when I die, if you have any decency left in your hide, it belongs to you. But not to her. Not today. Not like this."
Daniel began to weep. It was an ugly, rattling sound, the weeping of an adult man who has run out of excuses and finds himself standing naked in the cold room of his own choices.
"She’s going to jail, isn't she?"
"That depends on Robert. And on Marcus Hayes. And on whether she signs the quitclaim back to me before the sheriff gets here with the writ."
Daniel lifted his face. His eyes were red, swollen, his nose running into his stubble. "She won't sign it. She says she’ll burn the place down before she lets you kick her out. She said that this morning when you were gone."
Margaret reached out. Her hand, hard-skinned and spotted with age, took Daniel by the hair at the back of his neck, exactly as she had done when he was twelve and had thrown an apple through the neighbor’s storm window. She pulled his head up until his eyes were level with hers.
"Then you’re going to go inside," she said, "and you’re going to pack her bags."
"Mom—"
"You’re going to pack her bags, Daniel. You’re going to take the little gold earrings she bought with the grocery money, you’re going to take her cashmere sweaters, and you’re going to put them in the trunk of that Audi. And if she screams, you’re going to sit on the porch until she finishes. Because if you don't, when the Franklin County cruiser pulls into this driveway tomorrow morning, I will not tell the deputy that you were an innocent bystander."
Daniel’s mouth opened. He looked at his mother’s eyes—the pale, water-clear blue that had never flinched from a priest, a doctor, or an undertaker.
"You’d let them take me?" he whispered.
May you like
"No," Margaret said, her voice cracking for the first time in three days, a dry, splintering sound like cedar kindling. "I wouldn't let them take you. I’d take you to the station myself. Because I did not spend thirty-eight years keeping you alive to see you turn into a thief."
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