Two Cokes and a Fish Fry Menu

The Second Signature

Gil gave me the menu before we left. He folded it once and handed it across the bar to me and said, “Take this home to Russ. He ought to see it. And Shari,” he stopped, and swallowed. “I’m sorry. I should’ve asked. I knew it was too much money for him to have just lying around. I didn’t want to know.”

“I know,” I said. “Neither did he.”

Russ got home from second shift a little after midnight. I was sitting at the kitchen table with the menu, and the coffee can, and two cups of decaf. He stood in the doorway in his coat for a long time before he came and sat down.

“Gil called me on my break,” he said. “He told me what happened. He told me what she said.” He shook his head slowly. “He said she ordered him a Coke.”

“She did.”

He picked up the menu and read it. I watched him read it. He got to the line about Grandma planning to be ninety-two, and he laughed, and then the laugh turned into something else and he put his hand over his eyes.

“There’s room at the bottom,” I said, and pushed the pen across to him.

He looked at me. “You want me to sign it?”

“I want you to promise it. Same as he did. If he misses a month, it comes out of us.”

He didn’t hesitate. He took the pen and wrote his name under his brother’s, Russell J. Kowalczyk, in the same blocky printing, and then he put the pen down and folded his hands on the table and looked at me.

“There’s more,” he said. “You said tell you everything, and I didn’t, not all of it.”

My stomach dropped. “Tell me.”

“I changed the statements to paperless in October,” he said. “So they’d go to my email instead of coming in the mail where you’d see them. That’s why you didn’t know. It wasn’t that you weren’t paying attention. I made sure you wouldn’t.”

I sat with that. It was worse, somehow, than the money.

The money he gave away. The statements he took from me on purpose.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked. “I would never have found out.”

“Because Flossie walked into that bar at eighty-six years old in her good coat and made my brother answer for it in front of everybody,” he said. “And I’m not going to be the only one in this family who didn’t.”

I didn’t forgive him that night. I want to be honest about that. I went to bed and lay awake and listened to him not sleep on the other side of the bed, and I was angry until almost four in the morning.

But in the morning, I changed the statements back to paper, and I added my name as the primary contact on the email, and he sat at the table and watched me do it and didn’t say a word. And then he made me eggs.