My mother uninvited me from Thanksgiving four days out, because my stepsister was being toasted for her promotion and, as she put it, “nobody hears a word Abby says once you walk in wearing that uniform.” So I turned in my plane ticket and took the storm shift. By ten that night her guests were watching me on the news.
My duffel was already zipped by the door, and my dad’s old pie tin sat on top of it in a dish towel, because I’ve made his pecan every November since we buried him.
She didn’t call to see how I was.
She called to read me the guest list.
Abby’s regional director. Two women from the credit union board. Gino’s golf buddies from the dealership, and their wives.
“It’s Abby’s year, Riley,” she said. “Branch manager at twenty-nine. Do you know how rare that is?”
I said I knew.
“Then you know what happens when you walk in,” she said. “Somebody asks about the boat thing, and it’s two hours of helicopters.”
The boat thing.
Eleven people off a sinking charter in eight-foot seas last March. Two of them were under ten.
Behind her, Gino’s television was going, a football game, the crowd noise rising and falling like a furnace kicking on.
Then Abby picked up the other phone.
Abby doesn’t really laugh. She announces that something was funny.
“Maybe just come Friday,” she said. “Leftovers. Wear a sweatshirt or something.”
“A sweatshirt,” I said.
“You know what I mean. Everybody gets weird around the uniform.”
Then my mother said the part she’d been saving.
“Gino already told everybody you’re out on a boat somewhere,” she said. “So it’s not like anyone’s expecting you.”
I was holding the iron over a shirt I wasn’t going to need anymore.
I almost told them a few things right there.
Like that Abby’s credit union had been running my picture since May.
Me in a helmet and dry suit with a little boy clipped to my chest, under big white letters that said YOUR HOMETOWN, YOUR HEROES, YOUR BANK.
I never signed anything for that photo.
Gino told me at Easter she’d put it in the slideshow for her interview. He said it like I should be proud.
And I almost asked my mother whose name was on the deed to the house where she was laying out the good plates.
The name on it was MINE, not hers, and I’d paid the property tax on that house EVERY SINGLE APRIL for three years so she’d never have to sell.
Dad left it to me. She knew that. She just never brought it up with Gino in the room.
I didn’t say a word of it.
“Okay,” I said.
Nobody said anything.
My mother hates okay from me. It sounds like a door shutting.
“Riley. Don’t do that.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.”
I hung up and unplugged the iron.
The airline turned my ticket into a credit I’ll probably never use.
Then I called the duty desk in Waukegan.
A gale was coming down the lake Thursday afternoon, gusts near fifty knots, a November blow like the ones that used to put ore boats on the bottom up here.
Sameer had the holiday standby.
His wife had a five-week-old at home and her parents driving in to meet him.
“Are you kidding?” Sameer said when I offered. “You’d give me Thanksgiving?”
“I wasn’t using it,” I said.
He hugged me in the parking lot like I’d pulled him out of the water.
Thursday at four, I was in the ready room with my gear laid out on the bench and a gas station coffee going cold next to my fins.
The vending machine in the hall had been out of everything but cinnamon gum since August.
My screen kept lighting up.
My mother first.
“Please don’t turn this into a whole thing. Gino feels terrible.”
Gino never texted.
Then Abby.
“Don’t rescue anybody too famous today lol”
I turned the phone over on the bench.
Here’s what none of them knew.
On Tuesday a woman named Tara Dugan had left me a voicemail.
She ran compliance at Abby’s credit union, and she wanted to know, very politely, where my signed release for the billboard photo was, because she couldn’t find one anywhere.
I hadn’t called her back.
And on Monday, our public affairs officer had booked a news crew for Thursday evening. A holiday segment. The people who work while you eat.
They wanted the duty swimmer on camera.
As of Sunday, the duty swimmer was me.
At 5:52 the alarm went.
A tug with four men aboard was taking water off the north breakwater, and the lake was throwing twelve-footers over the light.
I passed the reporter in the hallway with my helmet already on.
She swung her camera around and trailed me out the door.
I didn’t know Gino keeps the news on straight through pie.
I didn’t know Abby’s regional director would be sitting closest to the screen.
And I didn’t know my phone, screen-down on that bench, was about to start ringing and NOT STOP.
Thirty-eight
All four men came off that tug. Wei ran the hoist and Esteban held us over the stern in gusts that kept shoving the helicopter sideways, and by 9:30 the last of them was sitting in the hangar in a wool blanket, asking somebody for a cigarette. The youngest one had held the strap on my vest the whole ride in, and somebody from medical had to work his fingers loose.
I got back to the ready room at 10:40 with the lake still coming out of my hair, and I turned the phone over.
Thirty-eight missed calls.
Seventeen from my mother. Nine from Abby. Two from Sameer, plus a text in capitals: YOU’RE ON CHANNEL 7 RIGHT NOW. One from Gino, who had not called me once in nine years. He didn’t leave a message.
And one at 10:09 from a number I’d saved on Tuesday and never dialed.
I played my mother’s last voicemail first. Behind her, a whole room was being quiet on purpose.
“Joann is asking me why my daughter isn’t at my table,” she said. “Joann Galbraith, Riley. Abby’s director. What am I supposed to say to that?”
Abby’s last one was a text. “did you set this up”
Then I played Tara Dugan.
“Ms. Huynh, it’s Tara Dugan again, from the credit union. I’m sorry about the hour. I just saw you on the news, and I’d rather not wait until Monday. Your sister sent us a document on Wednesday with your name on it, and I need you to look at it.”
Wednesday.
The day I would have been on a plane.
Forty thank-you cards
My dad died the October I turned twenty-two.
The week after the funeral, my mother sat at the kitchen table in his house with a box of forty thank-you cards from the drugstore and signed every one of them from both of us. I was on the couch in his flannel shirt, no use to anybody. The church casserole dishes were stacked by the sink with names on masking tape.
She held one up so I could see it.
Love, Debra and Riley. My name in her hand, with a big loop on top of the R like a ribbon on a present.
I’ve never made an R like that in my life. I sign R. Huynh, a flat R and a line, the way I signed every form at boot camp.
“Nobody’s going to compare, honey,” she said. “It’s a card.”
Two weeks later a lawyer read the will at that same table. The house went to me, paid off. My mother stayed on in it, because that was easier than talking about it.
“It’s all the same,” she said that night. “It stays ours.”
The money went the same way. Dad had opened me a savings account when I was twelve, with her name on it as the grown-up. When Abby got hired at the credit union, Mom moved the whole family’s banking over to help Abby’s numbers, and mine went along. Forty dollars in an account I never once logged into.
Then at Easter this year, the same Easter Gino told me about the slideshow, he stood at the grill and said once they sold this place they were getting a condo in Scottsdale near his brother. “Right, Deb? Two bedrooms and a pool.”
My mother took the tongs out of his hand and asked who wanted a burger.
In the ready room, the phone lit up again on the bench, face up this time.
Mom.
11:05
“Do you have any idea what that was like?” my mother said.
She’d gone into the laundry room. The dryer was running behind her and the party was gone.
“Joann stood up in the middle of pie,” she said. “She pointed at the television and said, ‘That’s her. That’s the girl on our billboard.’ Then the reporter said your name, and everybody turned around and looked at me. Two women from the board were sitting right there with their coats on their laps.”
“Gino told them I was on a boat,” I said.
“Gino told them what I told him to tell them.”
The line clicked. Abby, on the other phone.
“You knew the camera was coming,” Abby said. “You knew on Sunday. You picked my night.”
“I found out Monday. Public affairs booked it. I didn’t know it was me until somebody put the schedule on the board.”
“I gave my toast at ten-fifteen,” she said. “To a room full of people asking me what my sister’s like.”
Then she hung up.
My mother breathed through her nose, the way she used to over my report cards.
I tried to fix it. I fix things for a living, and I’m good at it everywhere but in that house.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said. “Leftovers, like Abby said. I’ll call Joann myself if you want. I’ll tell her it was a shift swap and nobody’s fault.”
“You will not call Joann.”
“Then I’ll just come.”
“Come,” she said. “Wear the sweatshirt. And if that woman from the bank calls you, you don’t call her back until you’ve talked to me.”
I hadn’t said one word about Tara Dugan.
“Mom. What woman from the bank?”
“Go to bed, Riley.”
Check 4471
I slept on the cot in the duty room and called Tara Dugan at 7:30 Friday morning from the passenger seat of Sameer’s truck.
He’d shown up at seven with a foil plate from his mother-in-law, turkey and some rice thing with raisins in it, and he wouldn’t hand me my phone until I’d eaten half.
“You’re not having gum for Thanksgiving,” he said. “Whatever this call is, I’m sitting right here for it.”
He had a picture of the baby taped to his dashboard, a red, furious face in a hospital hat.
“She’s got her grandma’s chin,” he said, like that settled something.
Tara answered on the second ring, like she’d been up for a while.
“Thank you for calling,” she said. “I’ll be quick. On Wednesday your sister emailed us a talent release for the Hometown Heroes image. It’s dated May second. It’s signed Riley Huynh. Her note says it had been misfiled in her desk.”
“I never signed a release.”
“I understand. That’s why I called. I’ll be honest with you, I had the release open on my desk when your face came on the television.” Paper moved on her end. “There’s a second piece. When a release is on file, the campaign pays a fee to the person in the picture. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Our marketing department cut you a check on May fifth. Check 4471.”
“I never got a check.”
“It was endorsed and deposited on May sixth, at our Route 41 branch,” she said. “Into a savings account. The one ending in 0619.”
Sameer looked over at me.
I knew those four numbers. I’d copied them onto a deposit slip at twelve years old with my dad’s pen, because he made me learn them.
“That’s mine,” I said. “My dad opened it when I was twelve.”
0619
The app wanted a password I’d made up in high school. It took two resets and a code texted to the same phone that had been ringing all night.
Balance: $40.17. Most of it birthday money from middle school.
I scrolled back to May.
May 6. Deposit. $2,500.00. CHECK 4471.
May 7. Withdrawal. $2,500.00. Route 41 branch. Teller.
There was a little camera icon next to the withdrawal. I touched it, and the slip came up, signed at the bottom.
Then Tara’s email landed. I opened the release, and then the back of the check, and held the phone out so Sameer could flip through them with me.
Riley Huynh. Riley Huynh. Riley Huynh.
Every R with a big loop on top, like a ribbon on a present.
Sameer squinted at the screen. “That’s not how you sign. You sign like a fence post.”
“No,” I said.
He didn’t ask whose it was. He turned the heater up and looked out the windshield at the lake, which was flat and gray that morning, like it hadn’t tried to kill anybody the night before.
I called Tara back.
“It isn’t my signature,” I said. “Not on any of them. I’ve never been inside that branch.”
“All right.” She typed for a while. “I have to tell you I’m meeting with your sister and HR on Monday regardless. And I have to ask whether you want to make a police report.”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure. I’ll put in writing that I didn’t sign it. That’s all I’m going to put in writing.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I’m going to ask her first,” I said.
I drove home, took the pecans out of the freezer, and set the ironing board back up.
Then I plugged the iron back in.
The good plates
Abby opened the door in a credit union 5K sweatshirt. She looked at my shirt, then at the pie tin, then at my face.
“Seriously,” she said.
The leftovers were out on the good plates, the gold-rim ones, down the long table in my dad’s dining room. Gino had the game on. My mother came out of the kitchen drying her hands, saw the uniform, and stopped.
“I said a sweatshirt.”
I set the pie on the counter. Then I unfolded the pages I’d printed at the station and laid them next to it, the release on top.
She didn’t pick them up. She didn’t need to.
“Abby needed it by Wednesday,” she said. “That woman was going to pull the billboard, and the billboard is the whole campaign, and the campaign is why Abby got that job. Four days before her party. And you don’t answer anybody. You never answer anybody. You’re on a boat, you’re in a helicopter, you’re off in North Carolina for six weeks jumping in a pool. Do you know what happens to her if that billboard comes down? Back to teller. At twenty-nine. With Joann watching.”
“So you signed it.”
“I’ve been signing your name since you were five. Field trips. Your dad’s cards. You never once minded.”
“Mom,” Abby said. “You told me she signed it at Easter.”
My mother looked at her. “Oh, Abby. You knew.”
Abby sat down on the arm of the couch.
“Where’s the twenty-five hundred,” I said.
“It paid for yesterday.” She said it like it was obvious. “The ham. The bar. Joann’s wine, the good one. It was Abby’s night and it was your picture, so I thought that was fair. And if you’d walked in here in that shirt, Joann would have gone straight across the room to thank you for signing. That’s all it was. I was looking out for your sister.”
I told her I’d called Tara at seven-thirty and said it wasn’t my signature.
Abby already had her phone out. “I have HR at nine on Monday,” she said. “It came in an hour ago. Riley. What did you do.”
“Get out,” my mother said. “Get out of my house.”
Gino turned off the game.
He came over the way he walks the lot when a customer’s reaching for his keys.
“I called you last night,” he said to me. “Joann asked me if the bank paid you for that picture, and I said I sure hoped so. And Deb took the pie server right out of my hand.”
He looked at my mother. “Whose house, Deb?”
She didn’t answer him.
“Mine,” I said. “Dad left it to me. I pay the taxes every April.”
“You told me it was yours,” Gino said to her. “I told the realtor March. I told my brother.”
“Gino, not now.”
“Then when?”
Nobody answered him.
I took a gold-rim plate off the stack, turned the pecan out onto it, and folded the dish towel over my dad’s empty tin.
“If you walk out that door,” my mother said, “don’t you call me again.”
“Okay,” I said.
Christmas Eve
My duffel was zipped by the door, and the pie tin sat on top of it in the dish towel, a pecan inside, still warm.
Sameer’s in-laws had stayed through the holidays. His wife had texted me the address twice, in case I got lost on purpose.
The billboard on Route 41 came down the second week of December. Tara sent me a picture of the empty frame with no message.
Abby’s name was still on the credit union website. Assistant manager, at a branch two counties over.
Gino texted me for the first time on the eighteenth. “County stuff came here with your name on it. Want me to mail it?”
I wrote back yes, and my address.
My phone stayed quiet otherwise.
The airline credit expired in my inbox on the twentieth. I let it.
I signed the card for the baby at the kitchen counter. R. Huynh. A flat R and a line.
Sameer’s wife opened the door with the baby on her shoulder. I handed her the pie, and she handed me the baby.
If this one got to you, send it to the person in your family who always gets asked to sit the holiday out.
For more family drama sparked by a shocking accusation, read the trooper’s call that changed everything and the foster boy accused at the pawnshop. And for another family dispute over money and loyalty, see the siblings who called their brother a freeloader.
