At my father’s 85th birthday, my older brother raised his wine and told twenty-two guests that once Dad was gone they’d sell his $640,000 house and that I could “take your foster strays somewhere else.” Then he said one of those kids stole Dad’s watch. I had the pawn ticket in my purse, and Dad’s writing was on the back.
Anish was fourteen, and he was three chairs down from Bryan when he said it.
I’d been living in Dad’s house for six years by then.
I moved back to Kenosha the spring after his stroke, with every kid the county had placed with me, because somebody had to be awake at three in the morning when he couldn’t find the hallway light.
Bryan lived forty minutes away. Marcus lived twenty.
They came at Christmas.
And they came at Easter the year they wanted to talk about the will.
The party was in Dad’s dining room with both leaves in the table and Tamara’s caterer doing the food, because Bryan said my cooking was “a lot of casserole.”
The caterer brought her own salt and pepper shakers, little ceramic owls.
Dad sat at the head in the gray cardigan Mom bought him the winter before she died.
My six were spread down one side in their good shirts. The two little ones had been told about the cake forty times.
Bryan stood up before the candles.
“To Dad,” he said. “Eighty-five years, and he still cheats at cribbage.”
Everybody laughed. Dad didn’t.
“Marcus and I have been talking,” Bryan said. “Nobody likes this part, so I’d rather say it once, with the whole family here.”
Tamara put her hand on his sleeve. He shook it off.
“When the day comes, the house gets sold. Marcus and I split it down the middle.”
He turned his glass toward me.
“Linds has had SIX YEARS in here without paying a dime of rent. That’s her share. Honestly, that’s more than her share.”
I had a fork in my hand.
I put it down.
“So you’d have till the spring after,” he said. “Plenty of time to find somewhere for you and your foster strays.”
Mom’s cousin said, “Bryan, that’s enough.”
Marcus looked at his plate.
Then Bryan turned to the head of the table.
“And Dad, where’s the watch? You should have it on for the pictures. You always said it goes to the oldest.”
Dad’s hand went to his bare wrist.
“It’s been gone since August,” Dad said.
Bryan made a sorry face, like a man at a funeral he didn’t want to be at.
Then he looked down the table.
Straight at Anish.
“Huh,” he said. “Funny how things walk out of a house with six foster kids in it.”
Anish set his glass down so carefully it didn’t make a sound.
He’d been with me eleven months. Before me there were four homes, and in two of them something went missing and he was the one they packed a bag for.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the tablecloth.
“Bryan,” I said. “Sit down.”
“I’m only saying what everyone’s thinking.”
“NOBODY here is thinking that.”
He shrugged and picked up his wine.
Here’s what Bryan didn’t know.
Marcus left his rain jacket on the hook by the back door after Labor Day.
I went through the pockets before I mailed it back to him. A gum wrapper. A receipt for gas. And a pink slip from a pawnshop out by the highway.
One men’s watch, silver, engraved. Loan amount nine hundred dollars. August ninth.
The name printed at the top was MARCUS ELLSWORTH.
Mom had that watch engraved the year Dad retired from the rail yard.
I took the slip to Dad in his chair. He read it twice.
Then he got a pen out of the side table, wrote something on the back, folded it in half and taped it shut with the clear tape he used to mend his crossword books.
“Bring this to my birthday,” he said. “Don’t open it. Don’t hand it to anybody but me.”
That was seven weeks ago.
It had been in my purse every day since.
Bryan was still standing.
“Look, I’m not accusing anybody,” he said. “I’m just saying a watch doesn’t get up and walk away.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
I took the pink slip out of my purse.
Marcus saw the color of it and went gray.
“What is that,” Bryan said.
“It’s a pawn ticket,” I said. “For Dad’s watch. Nine hundred dollars, August ninth, and your brother’s name printed right across the top.”
Somebody at the far end lifted a phone.
Tamara’s hand went over her mouth.
Marcus said, “Bry, you said we’d have it back before he noticed.”
“Shut the hell up, Marcus.”
“YOU PUT IT ON MY KID,” I said. “In front of everyone at this table.”
Bryan leaned both fists on the tablecloth.
“It’s a watch, Lindsay. It was coming to us anyway. This whole house is coming to us anyway.”
Dad held his hand out to me.
I gave him the slip.
His fingers shook on the tape, the way they’ve shaken since the stroke. He gave it back.
“You open it,” he said. “Read it loud enough for your brothers.”
“Dad, come on,” Bryan said. “Not here.”
“Here,” Dad said.
Marcus pushed his chair back like he meant to leave.
I worked the tape loose with my thumbnail.
The first word was Noriko.
My mother’s name.
August eighth
Under her name, in the block capitals he’s printed with since the stroke, Dad had written six lines.
I read them out the way he told me to.
“Noriko. The boys took your watch off my dresser the night of August eighth. Lindsay had the kids up at the lake. Marcus stayed over to sit with me and Bryan came by at ten. They thought I was asleep. I wasn’t. I want to see who they blame. Em.”
The caterer stood in the kitchen doorway with the cake and didn’t come in.
Bryan laughed first.
“He writes to Mom,” he said. “Everybody knows he writes to Mom. He’s been doing it in the margins of his crossword books since the funeral. This is that.”
“It’s got a date on it,” I said.
“It’s got a date a man with a stroke picked.”
Marcus was behind his chair with his coat half on. One arm in.
Dad didn’t look at Bryan. He looked down the table at Anish.
“Son, nobody here thinks you took anything,” he said. “Eat your dinner.”
Anish picked up his fork. He didn’t eat.
Tamara got her purse off the back of her chair. Mom’s cousin started stacking the little ones’ plates, which nobody had asked her to do. The phone at the far end was still up.
Bryan came around to the head of the table and put a hand on Dad’s shoulder.
“We’ll talk about this when you’re rested,” he said.
“I’m rested.”
Bryan took his hand back. Tamara had the front door open. Marcus followed them out with one arm still out of his coat.
Dad folded the note along its old crease and held it out to me.
“Nine hundred dollars,” he said. “Ask your brother what it bought.”
The manila folder
Bryan has had a key to this house since the week of the stroke.
He had it cut at the hardware store on Sheridan Road “for emergencies.” In six years the emergencies he used it for were Christmas and Easter.
This Easter he brought a manila folder.
I had all six at the egg hunt at the church on 45th. When we got back his Mazda was in the drive and the folder was on the kitchen table beside Dad’s crossword book, and Marcus was at the sink drinking a glass of water like it was a job.
“We’re just getting Dad’s affairs straight,” Bryan said. “Somebody in this family has to think past next Tuesday.”
That was Bryan. The practical one. He handled the hard conversations so the rest of us wouldn’t have to, and he told us so at every one of them.
That night I asked Dad if he’d signed anything about the will.
“Your mother and I did the will with Karan Lehmann in 2018,” he said. “I told your brother that. I didn’t sign anything about the will.”
I didn’t think to ask what else was in the folder.
Anish was at the end of that kitchen table all afternoon, with his notebook.
He’d had the notebook since before me. Blue, spiral, the kind that’s three for a dollar in August. He wrote down who came into a house and when, what time he got home from school, who was in the room when something got moved. His caseworker said it started after the second home.
I found it once under his mattress. I read one page and put it back. I never asked him about it.
The watch was on Dad’s wrist that Easter. Mom gave it to him in 2003, the year he left the rail yard. The back says E. Every minute after this one is mine. N. He wound it every morning with his coffee, twenty turns, before he started the crossword.
Sunday morning after the party, his wrist was bare and the crossword was blank.
And Bryan had already texted the family group.
Dad’s confused and Linds is using it. I’m not fighting about a watch. I’ve called the county about that house.
Sartori Pawn & Loan
Bryan didn’t pick up. Neither did Marcus.
Monday, with the others at school and daycare and Anish home with a stomachache he didn’t have, I drove out to the highway.
The pawnshop sits between a tire place and a Culver’s. The tire place has an inflatable gorilla on the roof with one arm that won’t stay up.
The man at the counter had reading glasses on a cord and a name tag that said JAKUB. The sign over the register said Sartori, so I figured that was him too.
He typed in the ticket number.
“It’s in the back,” he said. “Redeem by November seventh. With the interest you’re at one thousand thirty-five.”
I had eleven hundred dollars in a freezer bag behind the peas at home. It was for the van’s transmission, which slips every time I take the hill on Washington Road with six kids in it.
“I’ll pay it,” I said.
“You’re not Marcus Ellsworth.”
He slid a form across the glass. An authorization, a line for Marcus’s signature, a box that said copy of pledgor’s ID attached.
“Or he comes in himself,” Jakub said. “That’s the state, not me.”
I drove to Pleasant Prairie with the form on the passenger seat.
Marcus’s truck was in the drive. He came to the door in his socks and took the form and didn’t read it.
“Linds, Bryan says wait,” he said. “He says if we make a big thing out of it, it looks bad for Dad. He’s handling it.”
“Handling what?”
“Just leave it alone till after the seventh.”
“After the seventh they put it in the case and sell it.”
Marcus looked at the form and then at his socks.
“Yeah,” he said.
He gave the form back to me and shut the door.
I got home at a quarter to one.
There was a county car parked behind my van.
Arianna
Arianna had done my license renewal two springs ago. She sat at the kitchen table with a laptop and a coffee she didn’t drink and told me the report had come in Saturday night.
A placed child suspected of theft from an elderly resident. A home that was about to be sold, so the placement wasn’t stable. The caller asked that the county look at moving the children.
All six.
“I have to talk to Anish alone,” she said. “And I have to talk to your dad.”
Anish came down from his room in his good shirt from the party. He hadn’t changed it since Saturday.
They went in the den and shut the door.
I sat at the kitchen table with Dad. He did the crossword in pen and got four wrong, and he didn’t fix them.
Twenty-five minutes. Then Arianna came out and asked for Dad, and Anish went straight upstairs.
When she was done with Dad, she closed the laptop.
“Lindsay, I believe your father,” she said. “But a note in his handwriting is his word against his son’s. Right now the allegation stays in Anish’s file. I need something that isn’t somebody’s word.”
“Bryan’s word was enough to get you out here.”
“Bryan’s word came with a title.” She checked her notes. “He said he’s acting for your dad under a power of attorney. He said he’s arranging the sale and your father’s move to memory care.”
I looked at Dad.
“You never signed anything like that,” I said.
Dad set his pen down on the crossword.
“I signed one page at Easter,” he said. “He said it was so the hospital would talk to him.”
Page forty-one
Arianna left at two. I didn’t go upstairs. I didn’t know what to say to a fourteen-year-old who’d just been asked by the county whether he steals from old men.
At six Anish came down with the blue notebook.
He set it on the kitchen table and opened it to a page he’d already folded the corner on.
Aug 8. Lake. Tent with Jake and the twins. Not here.
“That’s the night in Grandpa’s note,” he said.
Then he turned one page.
Aug 12. 10:40. Uncle Bryan’s Mazda. Let himself in with his key. Lady with a clipboard and a tape measure. Did every room. Got on a ladder for the roof. Took pictures of the furnace. Uncle B said it’s a surprise for Grandpa’s birthday and don’t tell Lindsay. Left 11:55.
August twelfth I had the little ones at the dentist. Dad was napping. Anish was the only one in the house awake.
Under the entry, taped down flat with Dad’s clear crossword tape, was a business card.
Silvia Marino. Certified Residential Appraiser.
“She left it on the counter,” Anish said. “I put it in here so I’d have it.”
Nine hundred dollars on the ninth. A woman with a tape measure on the twelfth. And on Saturday, a number to the dollar in Bryan’s toast.
“You were sitting right there,” I said. “When he said it. You could have told everybody.”
He looked at me like I’d asked him something stupid.
“Who’d they believe?” he said.
I didn’t have an answer for him. I asked if I could take the tape up.
He nodded.
It came off the page clean. On the back of the card, in a hand I’d known since I was six, Bryan had written the billing.
Bill to B. Ellsworth, POA. Pre-listing. Rush.
Sunday, four o’clock
Tuesday I took a picture of page forty-one and drove it to Pleasant Prairie.
Marcus read it on his front step with his phone held close.
“He told me it was for a lawyer,” he said. “For Dad. So nobody could take the house out from under him.”
“Somebody was taking the house out from under him.”
He read the line about not telling Lindsay three more times. Then he went in, came back with his wallet, and signed Jakub’s form on his knee.
Wednesday I took the freezer bag to the highway. Jakub counted the twenties twice, went in the back, and came out with the watch in a zip bag with a paper tag on it. Four dollars and change came home with me. The transmission stays the way it is.
Thursday I drove Dad downtown to Karan Lehmann, the same office he and Mom used in 2018. Dad signed a revocation in front of a notary. Karan sent a copy to Bryan by certified mail and kept one for the county.
Friday I emailed Arianna the page and the pink slip.
Sunday at four, Bryan’s Mazda pulled in. He had the certified envelope. Tamara got out of the passenger side and stood by the car a while before she came in.
I had the six down the street at the neighbor’s. Dad was at the head of the table. Marcus was already there.
Bryan didn’t sit.
“This is a stunt,” he said. “You dragged a sick man to a lawyer to sign something he doesn’t understand. He can’t do stairs. He forgets the hallway light. You’re running a group home in a house you don’t own, Lindsay, and somebody had to look at that like an adult.”
I set the watch on the table in its zip bag. Then the card, with POA and Rush face up.
Bryan looked at the card and kept going.
“You know what Lakeview costs? I put eight thousand down in September. Nonrefundable. The listing agent was coming the ninth. I had it worked out so Dad goes in March and nobody has to carry him up those stairs.”
“And my kids,” I said.
“The county would have placed them. That’s what the county does.”
Tamara spoke from the doorway.
“The eight thousand was the boat,” she said. “Tell them about the line of credit, Bryan. Tell them who the bank calls.”
“Tam.”
“They call me. At work.”
Bryan looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at the card.
“I told you to let it go to the case,” Bryan said to him. “That’s all you had to do. Leave it alone till the seventh.”
Dad took the watch out of the bag. His fingers fought the clasp.
“You always said it goes to the oldest,” Bryan said. “I’ll take it now, Dad, and we’re done here.”
Dad held his wrist out to me.
I buckled it. Third hole, where it had worn the leather.
“The oldest is wearing it,” Dad said. “Leave your key, Bryan.”
Thanksgiving
We ate in the dining room with one leaf in the table. Casserole, two kinds.
The van made it up Washington Road in second gear with the flashers on.
Arianna’s letter came the Monday before. Unfounded. It’s still in Anish’s file, with the word unfounded next to it. It’ll be there when he’s thirty.
Bryan’s key is in the dish by the back door with the rubber bands and a dead battery. Nobody’s called him. Tamara sent a card with a gift certificate to the caterer. I haven’t used it.
Marcus came at ten after two with a store pie and sat in Bryan’s chair, because it was the empty one.
Before we ate, Dad lifted his glass of milk.
“To your mother,” he said.
Everybody drank. The little ones drank their whole cups and needed refills.
Anish sat at Dad’s left. When Dad held out his wrist, Anish wound the watch. Twenty turns. He counted them under his breath.
Then he got the blue notebook out of his back pocket and wrote 2:10, Uncle Marcus, pie, and put the pen down and passed the potatoes.
If you’ve got a sister who stayed when everybody else visited, send this one to her tonight.
Family betrayals have a way of resurfacing at the worst moments – see how one sibling was crossed out of the family portraits and how another was cut out of Dad’s house while a stepbrother ran up debt. And when promises about a parent’s home are written on a pizza box, the bills can still land at your door.
