A lawyer shoved past my father, seventy-nine, at the courthouse metal detector and told his phone he was stuck behind “a confused old man who can’t work a plastic bin” with a $2.3 million jury to pick. Dad asked me to drop it. Two hours later the judge came down off her bench and stopped at my father’s seat.
Dad got the jury summons in August.
Anybody over seventy-five in this county can check a box and mail it back.
He stuck it to the fridge under the pierogi magnet instead.
“They asked for me, so I go,” he said.
So on a Tuesday in October I took a personal day from the dental office and drove him downtown to the courthouse in Scranton.
Dad’s careful since the hip.
He does things in an order. Wallet, then reading glasses, then the summons folded in thirds in his shirt pocket.
Keys go last, because there’s an old brass whistle on the ring and it snags on the lining every time.
He’s carried that whistle my whole life. Four little lines scratched into the side near the mouthpiece.
When I was small he told me it was from a summer job at a pool. That was the entire story, every time I asked.
He was working it loose into the gray bin when somebody in line at our backs let out a sigh.
A big sigh. The kind meant for an audience.
Navy suit, rolling briefcase, one earbud in.
He cut past my father on the left, then slid his own bin onto the belt ahead of ours.
Dad had to catch the edge of the table to get out of his way.
“Excuse me. He was next,” I said.
Nothing. He didn’t even turn his head.
His phone buzzed and he answered it at full volume.
“Yeah, I’m through. Got stuck behind a confused old man who can’t work a plastic bin,” he said. “Swear to God, they should run them through a separate door.”
He was grinning, pleased with his own joke.
Over by the X-ray monitor, the guard kept his eyes on the belt.
My face went hot all the way to my ears.
Dad heard it. I know because he set his keys in the bin very slowly, like they could break.
“Leave it, Jus,” he said.
“Dad, he just called you—”
“I heard what he called me. We’ve got all day.”
He squeezed my wrist twice. He’s done that since I was six and wanted to fight somebody on the swings.
So I swallowed it.
Two hours later they called his group into Courtroom 4.
Dad got a laminated card with 31 on it. He held it in both hands like a hymnal.
I sat behind the panel in the public seats.
And there was the navy suit.
Plaintiff’s table. Tapping a pen on a yellow pad.
He turned around once to look over the jurors. His eyes went across my father like he was a coat rack.
“Half of them need a nap,” he said to the paralegal next to him. Not quietly.
Then the bailiff told us to rise.
The judge came in through the side door. Sixties, short gray hair, glasses pushed up on her head.
She sat, picked up a sheet of paper, and looked out at the panel to start her welcome.
She got about four words in.
Then she quit talking.
She was looking at the third row.
At Dad.
She pulled her glasses down. Looked again.
Then she got up and came down the steps off the bench.
Even I know judges don’t do that.
The bailiff took half a step after her and stopped.
She walked the whole length of the aisle to row three, and my father was on his feet before she got there.
She held out both hands. He took them, keys and all.
“Mr. Toth,” she said. Her voice broke on the T.
“Hello, Nadine,” Dad said.
NADINE.
My father, who still calls the mailman “sir,” was on a first-name basis with a judge.
“I looked for you,” she said. “For YEARS. You moved.”
“Twice,” he said. “You look good, Your Honor.”
“DON’T YOU DARE call me that.”
She was holding on like he might leave again.
At the plaintiff’s table the pen had gone quiet.
Her eyes dropped to where their hands met. The brass whistle was hanging out of his fist.
She touched it with one finger.
“You kept it,” she said.
“It still works,” Dad said.
She laughed, and it came out wrong, half a sob.
Then she turned and looked straight at me.
“This is Justine?”
I had never seen this woman in my life.
“Does she know?” she asked him.
Something closed in my father’s face. He let go of her hands.
“NOT HERE,” he said.
Behind her, the lawyer had his phone out under the table.
Typing. Scrolling.
Then not scrolling.
His eyes went phone, Dad, bench, phone.
“Oh, shit,” he said. Out loud. In a courtroom.
He twisted around in his chair toward me.
“The reservoir. February of ’73,” he said. “That’s your FATHER?”
“What reservoir?” I said.
He started to turn the phone around so I could read it.
“Mr. Spruill,” the judge said, without looking at him. “Put that away. NOW.”
It went face down on the table so fast it bounced.
His ears were red. His eyes stayed glued to the yellow pad like it held something he needed.
Sixty strangers in that room and not one cough.
I got up.
“Dad. What happened at a reservoir?”
He didn’t answer me. He looked at the whistle.
Forty-six years old and I’d never once seen my father look scared of something in his own hand.
His fingers came open, one at a time.
The judge ran her thumb over the four little scratches by the mouthpiece.
“There should be five,” she said.
My father said her name like a warning.
She looked right at me anyway.
Row three
“Four of us went through the ice on Lake Scranton,” she said. “February of ’73. Your father brought out four. I was the third.”
She held the whistle up between us.
“And in 1985 he went into that same water one more time. For you. That’s five.”
I was four in 1985.
I don’t remember any water. I remember a red snowsuit, and wet wool steaming in a car heater, and that’s all of it.
“She was four,” Dad said. “It doesn’t count.”
“It counts, Conrad.”
“Nadine.”
That was the whole argument. She looked at him a long second, then pressed the whistle back into his hand and folded his hand shut around it herself.
She walked back up the aisle. She didn’t use the steps by the jury box. She went the way she came, past the plaintiff’s table, and she didn’t look at it.
At the bench she put her glasses back up on her head.
“We’ll take fifteen minutes,” she said. “The panel stays in the building. Counsel will not speak to any member of this panel.”
The door to chambers shut behind her.
Dad sat down. He put the keys in his coat pocket, whistle and all, and buttoned the pocket.
Sixty people were looking at us.
I leaned over the rail between the public seats and row three.
“Dad. When did you pull me out of a lake?”
Rock salt
Every November of my life, Dad bought a fifty-pound bag of rock salt at the True Value and stood it by the back door.
He salted the driveway at night. Before it snowed. Sometimes when it wasn’t going to snow at all.
Mom called it his religion. She’d watch him out the kitchen window with her coffee and say, “There goes Father Toth.”
I never owned skates. Every kid on our street in Dunmore went to the pond behind St. Mary’s when it froze. I asked once, at nine.
He said no so fast that Mom put her cup down.
When we drove to my aunt’s in Moosic, we took the highway the long way around. Twelve extra minutes. I asked why one time and he said the other road had bad lights.
I have a little white scar under my chin. Mom always said porch steps. Dad left the room every time it came up, and I thought it was because he didn’t like hearing about me getting hurt.
Mom died in 2019. Rona Toth. Forty-four years of rock salt and she never once said a word.
The whistle was from a pool. That part was true. He was a lifeguard at Nay Aug for three summers when he was young, and the whistle came home with him on the last day and never went back.
On the drive down that morning we’d passed a billboard on the Casey Highway. A man in a navy suit, arms crossed, eight feet tall. GIOVANNI SPRUILL INJURY LAW. I FIGHT FOR FAMILIES.
Dad had read it out loud. “Fights for families.” Then he asked if I’d packed him a banana.
I hadn’t made the connection until the plaintiff’s table.
Now we were out in the hallway on a wood bench outside Courtroom 4, and Dad was turning his juror card over and over in his hands.
He hadn’t answered me.
He asked if the vending machine took dollar bills. I said I didn’t know. He said he’d go look in a minute and didn’t move.
Then the courtroom door opened, and the navy suit came out.
Page A1
He had the paralegal with him. Young, blond, a laptop bag on her shoulder. Her name tag on a lanyard said KAYLEE.
“Mr. Toth,” he said. “Giovanni Spruill.”
He held his hand out. Dad looked at it until it went back in his pocket.
“Listen. Downstairs. I was on with my office, I’d had a morning, and that came out wrong. My grandfather was a miner up in Olyphant. I’ve got nothing but respect.”
“You said what you said,” Dad said.
“Sure. Sure I did.” He sat on the end of our bench without asking. “Can I show your daughter something? Since it’s out there now.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned the phone to me.
It was the Scranton Times, February 1973, from some archive site. Page A1. A photograph of a skinny kid with wet hair and a blanket over his shoulders, standing by a pump house.
POOL GUARD, 25, PULLS 4 CHILDREN FROM LAKE SCRANTON ICE.
Conrad Toth, of Dunmore.
There was a list of the kids. The third name was Nadine Gentile, 8.
I read it on Giovanni Spruill’s phone, in a hallway, with Giovanni Spruill breathing next to me.
Dad had gone out on a wooden ladder from the pump house. The ice kept breaking under the rungs. He blew the whistle the whole time, short blasts, so the kids would keep their eyes on him and not on the hole.
“They kept looking at me,” Dad said. He wasn’t looking at the phone. “That’s all a whistle does. It gives them something to look at.”
“It’s an incredible story,” Spruill said. “It really is. My client would love it.”
He put the phone face down on his knee.
“Here’s my problem. In about ten minutes she’s going to call the panel back in, and she’s going to ask if anybody’s had contact with counsel. Today. Anywhere in the building.”
“Contact,” I said.
“A guy bumps a guy in a security line. That’s not contact. Nobody’d call that contact.” He leaned past me toward Dad. “You can say no and it’s true.”
He smiled at me like we were on the same side of something.
“All I need is for him to say no.”
The X-ray belt
“No,” I said.
The smile stayed on. It just stopped going anywhere.
“Let me tell you who you’re saying no to. Bernard. Roofer, fifty-one, came off a ladder at a warehouse in Pittston three years ago. The company’s insurance has been sitting on him since. He’s in a wheelchair at my table right now. He’s been waiting three years for a jury.”
“Then you should’ve waited in line,” I said.
“If your father stands up in there, she asks the whole panel what they heard me say. You know what they heard.” He looked at Kaylee. Kaylee looked at the floor. “She strikes the panel. Bernard goes to the back of the calendar. April, maybe. Maybe next fall.”
I got up.
I went down the stairs to the lobby. The guard was still at the X-ray monitor. DARIUSZ, his badge said. Fifties, a thermos by his elbow.
“You saw that this morning,” I said. “The man in the navy suit. My father.”
“I watch the belt, ma’am.”
“You were six feet away.”
“I watch the belt.” He didn’t look up from it. “I’ve got a pension in two years.”
So that was that. I went back up.
Spruill had moved. He was sitting closer to Dad now, and he had the phone out again, and he’d kept scrolling while I was gone.
“Okay,” he said, quieter. “I didn’t want to do this.”
He turned the screen to me.
A different page. Same paper. February 1985. Page B3, a little box at the bottom under the obituaries.
“If he says yes in there, I move to strike him for cause, and I make a record,” Spruill said. “That’s my job. The relationship with the bench. The ’73 story. And this one. On the record, in open court, with sixty people listening.”
He held the phone up so I could read the headline.
DUNMORE MAN, 37, PULLS DAUGHTER, 4, FROM RESERVOIR.
The girl was treated at Mercy Hospital for a cut to the chin and released.
The last line said Toth told police he had looked away for less than a minute.
February 11
Dad had his eyes shut.
I sat back down on the bench, on his other side, away from Spruill.
“Tell me,” I said. “Right here.”
“Jus.”
“He’s going to read it to sixty people. I’d rather hear it from you first.”
Dad opened his eyes. He took the keys out of his coat pocket and found the whistle with his thumb without looking.
“Every February 11 I drove out there,” he said. “To the pump house. I’d stand there a while. Your mother thought I went to the VFW.”
He turned the whistle over.
“1985, she was working a double at Mercy. So I brought you. You had the red snowsuit. You were happy. You liked the car.”
“Okay.”
“There were ice-fishing holes out a ways. I was looking at the spot. Where the hole was, in ’73. I was standing there looking at it and thinking about Nadine’s little face and the other three.”
He stopped.
“Less than a minute,” Spruill said, helpfully.
Dad didn’t turn his head. “Less than a minute. When I looked down you weren’t next to me. You were out on it. You’d gone for one of those holes.”
“Dad.”
“I went in at the edge. You were in up to your arms. I got you by the hood. Your chin caught the ice coming out. That’s the steps.” He touched under his own chin. “Your mother said porch steps because I asked her to.”
I put my hand on my chin. I didn’t decide to.
“Four lines for four kids,” Dad said. “You don’t get a line for pulling out what you walked in there yourself.”
Nobody said anything. Kaylee had her hand over her mouth.
“That’s the whole story,” Dad said. “There’s no more.”
All my life he’d told me there was no more.
The salt. The long way to Moosic. No skates. I’d thought my father was just a nervous man.
“You read it, then,” I said to Spruill. “Whatever you want. He’s already said it.”
Spruill opened his mouth.
The bailiff leaned out of the courtroom door.
“Panel back in,” he said.
Juror 31
Judge Gentile didn’t look at row three when she sat down. She read off the paper on the bench, flat, like she’d read it a thousand times.
“Before we go any further. Has any member of this panel had any contact with counsel for either party today? Anywhere in this building?”
Dad looked back at me over his shoulder.
He reached his hand back over the rail. I thought he wanted me to squeeze his wrist, the way he does mine. Leave it.
I put the juror card in his hand instead. He’d left it on the bench in the hallway.
He stood up and held it up. 31.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Toth.”
“In the lobby. At the metal detector. That gentleman went around me and said I was a confused old man who couldn’t work a plastic bin. And that we should go through a separate door.” He thought about it. “Not to me. He said it to his telephone.”
A woman in the second row held up her card. Then a man next to her, then two more behind me.
“Ma’am, I heard him say half of us need a nap,” the woman said. “We all did.”
Spruill was already standing.
“Your Honor, I need to make a record. I’m sorry, but I do. This juror has a personal relationship with the court that the court put on display before the entire venire, by leaving the bench, which, with respect, I’ve never seen in twelve years of practice. And there is a 1985 incident that bears directly on this juror’s judgment. He left a four-year-old child unattended on a frozen…”
“Mr. Spruill.”
“I’m making a record, Your Honor, I’m entitled to—”
“You’ve made it. Sit down.”
He sat down.
The defense lawyer stood up, a woman with a rolling cart full of binders. “Your Honor, the defense moves to strike the panel.”
“Granted.” The judge took her glasses off. “Juror 31 is excused for cause. The cause is that this court knows him, and the court is grateful to him, and the record can say that too. The panel is excused with the thanks of the county. Trial is reset. My clerk will give counsel a date in the spring.”
At the plaintiff’s table, the man in the wheelchair turned to Spruill.
“Spring,” Bernard said. “Gio. You said October. You said this was the one.”
Spruill was putting papers in his briefcase. He was putting them in wrong, folding the yellow pad in half.
“Gio. I took the van an hour for this.”
“We’ll talk in the car, Bernard.”
“I don’t ride in your car. I ride in the van.”
Kaylee was packing the laptop. She didn’t look at either of them.
Dad handed his juror card to the bailiff. He held onto it a second before he let go. He’d wanted to do this. He’d put the summons under the pierogi magnet.
On our way out, Dariusz was at the X-ray belt.
He looked up when we passed, and he got up and held the door.
Lake Scranton
February 11 fell on a Wednesday. I took another personal day.
Dad wanted to go alone. I drove anyway.
The pump house is still there. The path around the water is paved now, with mile markers and people in good sneakers walking it fast.
We stood where he said. The ice was gray and soft at the edges. Nobody was on it.
Nadine calls on Sundays now. She came to his birthday in December and brought a cake from the Italian place on Prospect and called him Conrad the whole time.
He did his order without thinking about it. Wallet. Glasses. Then the keys, last, and he worked the whistle loose off the ring with his thumbnail, same as at the gray bin.
He held it out on his open hand.
“Four,” he said.
I took it from him. I took my own car key out and set the point next to the fourth line, and I scratched in a fifth.
It went in crooked, and too deep, and longer than the others.
Dad looked at it a long time.
“Crooked,” he said.
Then he put it back on the ring, last, where it snags.
If your dad carries something on his key ring he’s never really explained, this might be the week to ask him about it.
For more stories about being underestimated before someone important sees the truth, read the brother who called his sister a receptionist and the father pushed into a camper. And for another family secret with a courthouse-worthy twist, there’s the note on the kitchen calendar.
