Chapter 11: What He Paid

Horvath Mechanical smelled like copper and coffee at seven in the morning.

The shop floor was empty. Forty trucks sat in rows with their noses to the doors.

Glenn unlocked a gray door at the back of his office.

Behind it was a safe the size of a small refrigerator, and he spun the dial.

He took out a black binder, three inches thick, and set it on the desk between us.

He did not sit.

"Open it," he said.

I opened it.

The first page was a bank confirmation, dated three years ago in April.

Four thousand dollars, wired to a Margaret Prewitt in Kettering.

The second page was the next month. Then the next.

Thirty-six pages, each with a small yellow flag.

"A hundred and forty-four thousand dollars," Glenn said. "I added it up last year, and I haven't looked since."

I turned to the back.

There was a printed email, and I read it standing, because my knees would not let me sit.

It was from my mother, dated the week before our wedding.

Glenn, I want to be honest with you because you're a decent man.

Veda cares for you but she is proud and will never say it.

She has agreed to the marriage on one condition, that her family not lose the income she has always brought to the store.

$4,000 a month would make that possible.

She is shy of being touched and will want to be left alone at first.

Please don't mention this to her, she would die of embarrassment.

The room went very quiet.

I read it twice. My eyes saw it, but my head kept sliding off it.

"She asked you for the money," I said. "In my name."

"Yes."

"I never agreed to anything. I never asked her to ask you."

"I know that now."

"I never said I was shy of being touched."

His jaw worked. He turned to the window, and the early light lay along the gray at his temples.

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