My Business Partner Wired Himself $340,000 the Night Before Our Buyout, He Forgot I Still Had the Old Bank Login

Part 4: Six Months Later

Six months later, in April, I was sitting at a picnic table outside a coffee shop in Granville, Ohio, waiting on a woman I had known in high school and had not seen in thirty-four years. Her name was Beth Kowalski, now Beth Reeves, widowed two years, and we had reconnected on Facebook in January the way people our age reconnect on Facebook, which is slowly and with too many exclamation points.

She was late. I did not mind.

I was drinking a coffee I did not need and reading a book about small-batch bourbon distilling that I had picked up at a Barnes and Noble in Columbus. Not because I was going to open a distillery. Because I was fifty-two and I had money and I did not know what I was doing next, and reading books about things I did not know how to do felt like the closest thing to a plan.

My phone buzzed.

Marcus.

I looked at it for a long time.

He had not called me since the closing. He had texted once, in December, a short message that said only Merry Christmas Ray. I had not answered it.

I let this call ring. It went to voicemail.

The voicemail was forty-one seconds long. I listened to it in the parking lot after Beth and I had lunch, because I did not want to listen to it in front of her.

Ray. It’s Marcus. Look. I know you don’t want to hear from me. I get that. I’m not calling to ask you for anything. I’m calling because Jess is getting married in June and I know she sent you an invitation and I know you’re not going to come. I get that too. But she asked about you last week. She asked if you were mad at her. And I told her no, that whatever was going on was between me and you and had nothing to do with her. So. I don’t know. If you wanted to send her a card. She’d like that. That’s all. Take care of yourself, Ray.

I sat in the parking lot for a while.

Jess was Marcus’s daughter. I had known her since she was eleven. I had taught her to drive a stick shift in the empty lot behind the shop when she was fifteen. I had given her a savings bond every Christmas from the time she was born until the year she graduated from Ohio State.

I had not sent one this past Christmas. I had not sent her a graduation gift when she finished her master’s in the spring. I had drawn a hard line and I had drawn it through her too, and I had told myself that was necessary and clean.

It was necessary. It was not clean.

I drove home.

I sat at my kitchen table and I wrote Jess a card. I did not know what to say. I wrote three drafts and threw two of them away. The one I kept said:

Jess. I’m sorry I’ve been quiet this year. It has nothing to do with you. I hope your wedding is everything you want it to be, and I hope the man you’re marrying knows how lucky he is. I taught you to drive stick in the parking lot behind the shop when you were fifteen. I remember you stalling out four times in a row and getting so mad you cried, and then you did it again and you got it. You’ve always been like that. Congratulations, kid. Ray.

I put a check in the envelope. Not a huge one. Enough.

I mailed it before I could change my mind.

I did not go to the wedding. That line, I kept.

Marcus texted me the day after. Just one line.

She cried. Thank you.

I did not answer.

I did not answer for a long time. Weeks. Then a month. Then two.

Then, in August, I ran into him at a hardware store in Newark. Neither of us had expected it. We were both in the plumbing aisle, both looking at the same shelf of PVC fittings, and we both saw each other at the same second.

Marcus had lost weight. Not in a good way. He looked older than fifty-two.

He said, “Ray.”

I said, “Marcus.”

We stood there.

He said, “I was going to pay it back. I know that sounds like the worst thing anybody ever said. But I was.”

I said, “I know.”

He looked at me. Surprised.

I said, “I read the LLC filings. Riverline was going to be a real supply company. You were going to run it out of the buyout money. You just needed operating capital first.”

He nodded once. Slow.

“It doesn’t make it okay,” he said.

“No. It doesn’t.”

We stood there some more. A woman with two small kids squeezed past us to get to the couplings.

He said, “I miss you, Ray.”

I did not answer that. I could not. I put the fittings I was holding back on the shelf and I said, “Take care of yourself, Marcus,” and I walked out of the store without buying anything.

I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a while.

Chief was in the passenger seat. He looked at me the way he looks at me when he knows I am upset but doesn’t understand why. He put his paw on my leg.

I thought about the Bob Evans parking lot. I thought about the community college welding class. I thought about the first check we ever cashed as Millwright Fabrication, $412 for a range hood we built for a Greek diner in Cambridge, Ohio, and how we had both signed the back of it and photocopied it and stuck it on the wall of the office.

I thought about the wire transfer. 6:17 p.m. The night before closing.

Both things were true. Both things had happened. Neither one canceled the other one out.

I did not text Marcus back. Not that day.

But I did, in September, when Chief died. Chief was fourteen and it was time and it was still the worst day I’d had in a long time. I sat on the kitchen floor for two hours after the vet left. And then, without really deciding to, I pulled out my phone and I texted Marcus.

Chief died today.

He wrote back in under a minute.

Oh no. Oh Ray. I’m so sorry. He was a good dog.

I looked at the message.

I did not write back. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.

But I did not delete it either. I let it sit there on my phone, at the bottom of a thread that had been silent for almost a year, one small light in the dark.

I stood up off the kitchen floor. I put Chief’s collar in the drawer where I kept the important things. I poured myself a glass of the bourbon I had started making in the garage in June, the small-batch stuff I did not know how to make and was learning to make anyway, and I sat on the back porch and I watched the light go out of the sky over the creek.

I was fifty-three years old.

I did not know what I was doing next.

But I was doing it.