My husband pressed charges against the eighty-six-year-old across our hall, $1,870 in groceries from the store Giovanni manages, and the morning of the hearing he told me, “You say one word for that old thief and you can sleep at your mother’s.” I sat on the last bench and kept my mouth shut. Until Wally pleaded guilty.
He’d had a stent put in last spring, he got around on a walker with tennis balls on the feet, and out in the hallway the prosecutor had already said the word JAIL twice.
And I was the only person in that building who knew why he’d done it.
Giovanni sat in the front row, right behind the prosecutor’s table, in the gray suit he’d bought for his cousin’s funeral.
He turned around once to find me.
Then he WINKED.
It was the second case on the docket at the courthouse in Erie.
Wally came in on the walker.
He had on his red cardigan with the leather buttons and a tie I’d never seen before, and his hands shook so hard on the grips that the whole frame rattled when he stopped.
Judge Maguire was a woman around sixty with her reading glasses on a beaded chain.
She went through her folder for a long time.
“Mr. Ogilvie, I’ve watched the store’s camera clips,” she said. “Eleven weeks of them. What I keep coming back to is what you took.”
She read the list out loud.
Children’s chewable vitamins. Seven tubes of strawberry toothpaste. A jar of shea butter. Juice boxes. A pack of purple hair ties. Nineteen boxes of macaroni.
One lunchbox with a cartoon horse on it.
The man in front of me had a price sticker stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
“Can you tell me who those things were for?” she said.
Wally kept his eyes on the table.
“They were for me, ma’am.”
“A lunchbox with a horse on it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Giovanni put a hand over his mouth.
His shoulders were shaking.
He’d done the exact same thing at our kitchen table in August, pulling the clips up on his phone and turning the screen to me with his fork still in his other hand.
“Look at him,” he’d said. “Look at the old bastard shoving hair ties up his sleeve. What’s he need hair ties for? The man is BALD.”
I hadn’t laughed.
He hadn’t noticed.
“Mr. Ogilvie, the prosecutor is asking for thirty days,” Judge Maguire said.
“I heard him.”
“You’re eighty-six years old.”
“I know how old I am. I took it. All of it. Whatever you decide is fine by me.”
“You don’t want to say anything? Nothing that might help you?”
He shook his head once.
“No, ma’am.”
My purse was in my lap.
Inside it was the thing I’d promised him I’d throw in the river.
I’d promised on the Fourth of July, in his kitchen, with the fireworks going off over the bay and his two hands wrapped around both of mine.
“Not Gio,” he’d said. “Not your sister. NOBODY. Swear it.”
So I swore.
Judge Maguire picked up her pen.
My legs stood me up before I’d decided anything.
“Wait. He doesn’t belong in a cell over this.”
Every head on every bench turned around.
She took her glasses off and let them drop on the chain. “Take your seat, or the deputy walks you out.”
“I’ve lived across the hall from him for six years. I’VE SEEN WHERE ALL OF IT WENT.”
Giovanni twisted all the way around in his seat.
His neck went dark red above his collar, and his mouth made two words at me.
Your mother’s.
Wally got the walker turned, which took him a long time.
He looked at me straight down the aisle.
“Mina. You gave me your word.”
“I know I did.”
“You gave me your word,” he said again, and his chin went.
“And you’re about to do thirty days for a LUNCHBOX, Wally.”
Giovanni stood up.
“That’s MY WIFE,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s been taking that man’s side since the week we moved in.”
“Sit down, sir,” Judge Maguire said. “Both of you.”
I didn’t sit.
I unzipped my purse.
The night the summons came, I’d sat with him after the officer left, and when he went to lie down I took it off the hook inside his door so nobody else would see it.
A school ID on a purple lanyard.
I held it up high enough for the judge to see the picture.
“Before you decide anything,” I said, “ask him why this was hanging inside his door.”
Wally closed his eyes.
“And ask him WHERE SHE IS RIGHT NOW.”
Ten after three
Judge Maguire didn’t ask him.
She looked at me down the length of the room, and I answered before the deputy got to my bench.
“She’s in fourth grade. Room 6, at the school on the east side. Her bus lets her off at our corner at ten after three, and she lets herself into his apartment with the key he tied to her backpack.”
The deputy put his hand out.
I gave him the lanyard.
He carried it up the aisle past Giovanni like it was a parking ticket, and the judge held the card close to her glasses for a long time.
“How old is this child?” she said.
“Nine.”
“Who’s with her after three?”
“Him.”
“And if he’s in the county jail by noon?”
Nobody answered that. Wally kept his eyes shut and his hands on the grips, and one of the tennis balls ticked against the floor.
Judge Maguire set the card face down on the bench.
“I’m not reading a child’s name into this record,” she said. “Nobody in this room says it. Is that understood?”
The prosecutor said yes. The deputy said yes.
Giovanni sat back down.
He didn’t look at the card. He didn’t turn around to ask me who she was.
He fixed his tie.
The hook inside his door
Essence brought her on the ninth of June, a Sunday, with a black trash bag of clothes and a pillow with no case on it.
I heard the elevator, then Wally’s door, then a woman crying in the hallway, and I looked through our peephole like anybody would.
Essence is Wally’s granddaughter. I’d met her twice in six years, both times at Christmas, both times she left before the ham.
That Sunday she kissed the top of a little girl’s head, handed Wally an envelope with forty dollars and a list of allergies, and took the stairs because she couldn’t stand there waiting for the elevator.
The program in Pittsburgh was six months. The county had already told her once: one more call about this girl and she’d go to a family nobody knew.
So nobody was going to call.
Wally’s door doesn’t latch unless you lift it. The first week of July it swung open while I was carrying his mail over, and there on the coat hook where his good hat used to hang was the ID from her old school in Meadville. Anya. A picture with one front tooth gone.
He came out of the kitchen with a dish towel and saw me looking at it.
That’s how I ended up at his table on the Fourth.
His Social Security is thirteen hundred a month. The stent copays were eating it, and Essence’s program wanted a share from family. Food stamps meant forms with a child’s name on them.
I never said her name in our apartment. Not once.
Gio was busy that summer anyway. His district manager, Rene, had him on a spreadsheet about shrink, which is the store’s word for what walks out without paying, and Gio talked about shrink at dinner the way other men talk about the Steelers.
He’s good at the store. The bakery lady loves him. He takes the dented cans to the church pantry every Thursday.
In September a birthday card from my mother landed in Wally’s box by mistake, and Gio carried it over himself. He was gone twenty minutes. He came back and said Wally’s place smelled like a school cafeteria.
When we got married, my mother made me open an account in my name only. “A woman keeps one door of her own,” she said. I put a little in every month for eleven years and never told Gio the balance.
The morning of the hearing it was $2,410.
Up at the bench, Judge Maguire put her glasses back on.
“Mr. Ogilvie,” she said. “Look at me.”
Room 214
Wally opened his eyes and turned the walker back around to face her.
“She’s my granddaughter’s girl,” he said. “She’s nine. That’s all I’m saying about her.”
“Did you take those things for her?”
“I took them.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
He looked at the front row first. Then at the table.
“I took them, ma’am.”
Judge Maguire wrote something and capped her pen.
“We’re in recess until two. Counsel, I want the store’s victim statement in my chambers before then. Mr. Ogilvie, you’ll stay in the building.”
Gio had my elbow before the courtroom door swung shut behind us.
He walked me past the water fountain to the window at the end of the hall, smiling at the deputy the whole way, and then he stopped smiling.
“You know what you just did? The county is going to have that kid in a stranger’s car by supper. That’s on you. Not me. You.”
“You pressed the charges, Gio.”
“On a thief. I didn’t know he had a kid in there. How would I know that? You hid it from me. My own wife.”
“I promised him.”
“You promised ME. In a church. In front of your mother.” He let go of my elbow and straightened my sleeve where he’d bunched it. “Your stuff’ll be in boxes in the hall tonight. Don’t knock.”
The prosecutor came down the hall with a folder under his arm. He was maybe thirty, with a lanyard of his own and a coffee he hadn’t touched.
“Ma’am? I’m Khoa, I’m with the DA’s office. I need to tell you something so you don’t get your hopes up.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t drop a theft case because a neighbor says there’s a kid. I’ve got eleven weeks of video and a guilty plea. And the store’s statement is very clear about what it wants.”
“Who wrote the statement?”
Khoa looked at Gio.
Gio didn’t look away from me.
“Somebody had to,” he said.
Khoa opened the folder and turned it so I could read the bottom of the page.
The store respectfully requests a sentence of no less than ninety days. Signed Giovanni Spadaro, Store Manager. Dated September fourteenth.
Rene
I went down the stairwell to the second-floor landing, where nobody could see me, and found Rene in my phone.
I had his number from the store Christmas party, the year Gio drank too much and Rene drove us home in a van that smelled like bananas.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Mina? Is this about Ogilvie?”
“He’s eighty-six, Rene.”
“I know how old he is. I didn’t want this.” He let out air into the phone. “We don’t do this to old people. Over seventy-five, they pay it back, we ban them from the store, done. It’s in the book. Gio knows it’s in the book.”
“Then why are we in court?”
“Because Gio told me he offered. He came in with the clips on a thumb drive in September and said he’d already talked to the guy at home, neighbor to neighbor. Said Ogilvie told him to go to hell and he’d do it again.”
I sat down on the step.
“Nobody offered him anything.”
Rene didn’t say anything for a while. A door banged somewhere above me.
“If he pays it,” Rene said, “I’ll sign off. I’ll call the DA myself. Today. But he has to pay it, Mina. I can’t eat eighteen hundred because I feel bad.”
“He’ll pay it.”
Wally was on the bench by the elevators, eating saltines out of his cardigan pocket and brushing the crumbs off his good tie.
I sat down next to him. He didn’t look at me.
“Rene says if it’s paid back, the store lets it go. That’s the rule. I’ve got it. I’ve got all of it, Wally. It’s not Gio’s money. It’s mine.”
“No.”
“It’s my mother’s account. Nobody even knows it’s there.”
“I said no.”
“Then she’s alone at ten after three. Is that what you want?”
He put a saltine back in the pocket and buttoned the pocket shut. His hands were shaking worse than they had on the walker.
“I made a deal,” he said. “I keep my end of things. I always kept my end of things.”
“A deal with who?”
He didn’t answer.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened.
Gio was standing inside it, and he didn’t get off.
Two o’clock
Judge Maguire came back in at two minutes after.
She had the victim statement on top of her folder and the ID card face down beside it, and she didn’t sit until she’d looked at the whole room.
“Mr. Ogilvie. Before I accept any plea, I’m required to ask you this. Has anyone threatened you, or promised you anything, to get you to plead guilty today?”
Wally looked at the front row.
“No, ma’am.”
Khoa stood up. “Your Honor, the store’s representative has asked to be heard.”
Gio stood and buttoned his jacket. He turned a little so the benches could see his face, the way he does at the store when he’s telling a cashier she did nothing wrong.
“Your Honor, I’ve managed that store eleven years. I’ve never pressed charges on anybody over sixty. My wife means well. She’s been feeding that kid since June like it’s a stray cat on the fire escape. But let’s be honest about what’s going on in that apartment. The man has a stent. He can’t get down the stairs. Anya’s mother is in some program in Pittsburgh and nobody knows if she’s coming back, and Anya needs a real…”
The judge put her pen down flat.
“Sir.”
Gio stopped.
“I turned that card over,” she said. “I told this room nobody says the child’s name. Your wife is sixty feet behind you. How do you know it?”
“She told me.”
He said it to the judge and not to me.
I stayed sitting. “I never said it in our house.”
“Mr. Spadaro?”
“It’s… it’s on the thing. The lanyard.”
“Which has been face down on my bench since ten o’clock this morning.”
Nobody on any bench moved. Khoa had his pen in the air over his legal pad and hadn’t written anything.
Judge Maguire turned to the defense table.
“Mr. Ogilvie. I’m going to ask you one more time, and I want you to think about the child when you answer me. Has anyone threatened you?”
Wally’s hands came off the grips.
He held on to the edge of the table instead.
“He brought a birthday card over,” he said. “In September. For Mina. Her mother sends one every year.”
“Go on.”
“He saw the hook. He asked who the little girl was. I told him a story, and he didn’t believe it.” Wally swallowed. “Two days later he came back. He said, plead to it and keep your mouth shut, and I don’t call the county about her.”
“And if you didn’t?”
“Then he calls them that night. And she goes to strangers. And her mother loses her.”
He looked straight at Gio.
“He said it was the cheap way out. For everybody.”
$2,410
“Oh, come ON,” Gio said.
“Sit down, Mr. Spadaro.”
He didn’t sit down.
“I gave him a break. Does anybody in this room get that? I could’ve called the county the night I saw that card. I didn’t. I let him keep her two more months. Two months. Who does that? I gave the man a way out where nobody gets hurt, he does a few weeks in the infirmary watching TV, the kid stays put, my numbers come back. That’s a kindness.”
“Your numbers,” Judge Maguire said.
“Rene has me on a NUMBER, Your Honor. Eleven weeks that man walks out with my inventory, on my cameras, and I’m supposed to eat it? Smile at him in the elevator? And then I come home and my wife’s carrying macaroni across the hall to him. Mine. From my store.”
“Sir, I’m going to tell you once more to sit.”
“I’m the VICTIM here.”
The deputy took two steps toward the front row.
Gio sat.
Judge Maguire took her glasses off again.
“I won’t accept a plea that was bought with a threat against a child. The plea is rejected. Counsel, I’m sending a transcript of the last ten minutes to your office, and I’d like somebody other than you to read it.”
“Understood, Your Honor,” Khoa said, and wrote something down at last.
She turned to Wally and her voice went down.
“Mr. Ogilvie, I’m sorry. I have a nine-year-old in this record living with a man on a walker, with nobody on paper. I have to call Children and Youth. Today. That isn’t up to me.”
Wally let go of the table and sat down hard on the seat of the walker.
That was the call he’d pleaded guilty to stop.
I’d brought it into the room in my purse.
I stood up.
“Then put my name on it. Mina Ghanem. Apartment 4D, across the hall from him. I’ll be at the corner at ten after three. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Mina.” Gio twisted around. “Not in my apartment. You hear me? Not one night.”
“She won’t be in your apartment.”
“And the store wants eighteen-seventy,” Gio said to the judge. “Who’s paying that? Her?”
I took my checkbook out of my purse. My mother gave it to me in a plastic cover eleven years ago, and it still had the bank’s flowers on the front.
“Rene said if it’s paid, the store lets it go,” I said. “He said he’d call the DA today.”
“You have a checkbook?” Gio said. “Since WHEN do you have a checkbook?”
I wrote it on my knee. Eighteen hundred and seventy dollars, payable to the store. The pen skipped on the eight, and I went over it twice.
Khoa came down the aisle and took it from me.
“Then go,” Gio said. “Go sleep in your mother’s account. I hope it’s real warm.”
Judge Maguire continued the case for thirty days pending restitution and a home visit from the county. She asked me if I’d be home when they knocked.
“Across the hall,” I said.
Wally was still sitting on the walker when the benches started to empty. He didn’t get up and he didn’t look at me.
“You broke your word,” he said.
“Yes.”
He held his hand out, and I helped him stand. He weighed nothing.
“It’s ten after,” he said. “Not quarter after. She waits on the curb if nobody’s there.”
The clock over the jury box said twenty to three.
The corner
On Thursday the boxes were in the hall when I got back from the store. Four of them, taped, and my mother’s lamp on top with the shade off.
I carried them across the hall one at a time.
The county woman came the Monday after. She opened Wally’s fridge, pushed the button on the smoke alarm, counted the beds, and wrote my name on her form in the space for the other adult.
I sleep on his couch. It has a dip in the middle that fits nobody.
The account has $540 in it now. My mother hasn’t asked, and I haven’t told her.
Essence calls on Sundays. Her program ends the twelfth of December, and Anya has the date written on the inside of the horse lunchbox in purple marker. Rene came by on a Saturday with the lunchbox in a store bag and a receipt stapled to it that said PAID.
Gio’s door is the one across the hall now. Some nights I hear his TV through it. Once I heard him laugh at something.
It’s a Wednesday in November, and the bus is late.
Wally is in the building doorway on his walker in the red cardigan, because he won’t wait upstairs, and I’m on the curb where she waits.
The bus comes around the corner at thirteen after.
Anya gets off third, with the lunchbox in one hand and a purple hair tie stretched around the wrist of the other, and her hair coming down all over her face.
She pulls the hair tie off and holds it up at me.
“Not so tight this time,” she said. “Wally says you pull.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who once kept a neighbor’s secret a little longer than they should have.
Stories of older people caught in cruel family and legal battles continue in the grandfather whose pension card was kept from him and the woman fighting to keep the home she raised her children in. And for another story about someone stepping up when a vulnerable person needs help, read the lunch hero who stood by a hungry student.
