“Whuuuh?” I asked.
“We’ve got problems, Ben. And you sounding wasted is not going to help matters. Follow me. Do you need to talk to the lady?” He motioned toward Short-and-Happy, who was looking at me. I was somehow able to communicate by sign language that I would call to set up the next appointment when I could speak coherently, when I would no longer be confident enough to ask for Gerilyn’s phone number.
“Give me your keys,” A.C. said. “I’m about out of gas after driving all over town trying to find you. Good thing Toby knew the name of your dentist.”
OK, A.C. was really starting to bug me. I hadn’t asked him to pick me up. The peace of my Novocain was wearing off. But because I wasn’t verbally or physically in a place to defend myself, I handed him the keys.
“We need to go down to the police station. What’s all this junk in here?” he asked as we got into my car.
I picked up the Morrows’ gift and the manila envelope and threw them into the back seat. I plopped down in the passenger seat and hoped to go to sleep. Had A.C. said something about the police station?
“The officer who questioned me Saturday couldn’t get a hold of you so he called me. Ben, you have some serious things to think about here. When did you and that Sinnot guy break things off?” A.C. started the car and pulled out of the strip-mall parking lot of Gentle Dental.
Sinnot? I hadn’t spoken with Sinnot in several weeks. A.C. was quickly trashing my whole escape plan.
“Ben, the officer mentioned that you would have reason to burn your place down if you were looking for a way out of a deal gone bad. Probable cause. What happened with you and Sinnot? You were the last one out of the salon on Saturday, right?”
I shook my head no.
“No? Someone else closed for you on Saturday?” A.C.’s voice was getting louder each time he spoke.
I nodded and attempted the word “Dunnay.”
“Jenae? Are you kidding me?” A.C. pulled the car over to the side of the road and parked. “Ben, you let Jenae close? You trusted Jenae with the keys to your business?”
I looked straight ahead.
“Ben, who hands his livelihood over to a woman with tight-fitting clothes and a pink stripe in her hair? Even if she is having one of her really, really happy days. What were you thinking?” A.C. spit as he was screaming.
I pulled the cotton out of my mouth.
“Ben, we need a plan here! The fire department has been working since yesterday to find the source of the fire.” A.C. hit the steering wheel. “Are you picking up on the fact that you just might be going to prison for arson? Are you following this at all?”
I nodded yes but didn’t look at A.C. He turned on the car and started driving.
In a calmer voice, he asked me, “Is there anything about the Sinnot deal that I should know before we go in there?” I guess my lawyer had taken over. Buddy A.C. had left the building, folks.
I shook my head no.
A.C. looked straight ahead as we drove quietly to the police department. I really didn’t have any feelings about the whole thing. I felt pretty peaceful in spite of his attack. Wishing I could go back to the chair at Gentle Dental and hang with my friends Norman Rockwell and Gerilyn, I refused to allow panic to enter into my mind. After all, a pretty good thing had happened today. I’d forgiven my father in the dentist’s chair today.
The father who left before I met him. The father who died before I knew him. The father for whom I paid for his burial. I had forgiven my father.
I was feeling pretty peaceful.
44
The Creek
Monday afternoon, November 10
1997
By the time A.C. and I arrived at the Omaha Police Station, the fog of my root-canal intoxication was beginning to lift. My peace was replaced by the unpleasant reality that I might be going to jail for a fire I’d never started.
“Just keep quiet. I’ll do the talking,” A.C. said under his breath as he opened the door for me. He looked up to a tall man with a mustache who appeared to be waiting for us outside of an office.
“Are you Arthur Perelman?”
“Yes, and this is Ben Keller. He unfortunately just had some major dental work done on his mouth, so…”
“I need to have you both come into my office. I have some news.” The man was neither rude nor friendly as he ushered us into his office. He cleared his throat as he shut the door and moved to the seat behind his desk.
“Take a seat.” The man looked at me and shook my hand. “Ben, I’m Eric O’Donnell. I’ve been working your case since the fire early yesterday morning.”
My case? I really hadn’t signed up for this.
“I just received a phone call from Kurt Taylor, the fire chief at the Omaha Fire Department. He and his team have been looking over the rubble of Vanity Insanity alongside three investigators from the police department and two men from insurance companies.”
Companies? I had only one company and a flawless track record. I wished I could speak.
“All groups seemed to agree that the fire started in the upstairs unit in a circuit box near a large pile of lumber.”
A.C. sat back and looked like he was going to ask a question when the officer continued. “The pattern of melting and charring suggests that the fire started inside the box rather than outside. Kurt’s team found a splattering of the copper wiring that indicates an electrical short followed an inflamed circuit, more than likely set off by the storm that night. I’m thinking an overload in the system caused a short in the system. I’m just guessing at this point, since that entire eastern wing of the Old Market lost electricity around that time.”
“So, is Ben good to go here?” A.C. was rubbing his hands back and forth on his slacks.
“Well, uh, yes. But officers from both the fire and police departments still need him to stick around for an hour or two to answer some questions. You’re welcome to stay with him. Did you say you were his lawyer?”
“Yes, I am representing Mr. Keller.” A.C.’s serious and professional demeanor was comical yet comforting as we moved with the officer to a different area of the police department.
As my lawyer and best friend, A.C. sat with me for the next few hours, translating my words here and there. The officer’s questions mostly pointed toward my motivation to burn down my business for the insurance money to be gained from such an endeavor. Was Vanity Insanity losing money? Did I have the financial security to move forward with the renovation project? What exactly was my relationship with Sinnot?
“Were you aware that Sinnot had filed for bankruptcy?” one officer asked me.
Are you kidding me? Sinnot had implied the entire time we were in the “wooing” stages of planning that he would carry the project financially to gain greater control of the salon. So much had been going on for me personally in those weeks that I wasn’t myself. Usually, I would have asked for his financial information or demanded more control of the project. My anger diminished when I remembered that I had signed no contract. I was done working with Sinnot.
I began talking in the second hour of questioning, and I answered all questions with less and less of a slur in my speech and more and more confidence. I had done nothing wrong. The good news on several accounts was that my business was thriving, and bank accounts could attest to that. My financial contribution to the project and my capability of finishing the project—had I wanted to—helped support my case.
“I think that went well,” A.C. said to me as we walked down the hall toward the exit.
“You don’t have to use your lawyer voice anymore.”
“I’m serious, Ben. I was pretty scared for you. You have no idea how serious this all looked this morning.”
Regardless of the outcome, no one could take away the peace that I had found in the dentist chair earlier that morning.
A.C. apologized—sort of—in the parking lot about his abrupt behavior when he’d found me at Gentle Dental. He hadn’t wanted to see his best friend go off to jail
for a crime that, at that point, he was not sure I hadn’t done.
“I’m starving,” I announced as A.C. started the car. I wasn’t sure if I could chew, but I knew that I needed something, so A.C. went through a McDonald’s drive-thru. I ordered two large vanilla shakes, and A.C. got a Big Mac combo. We needed comfort food. Neither of us had any idea where to go, so we sat in the parking lot of McDonald’s while he ate and I enjoyed my shakes.
“Who’s the present for?” A.C. asked in between bites as he pointed with a french fry to the gift in the back seat of my car.
“Stinky…I mean Father Stinky asked me to drop it off at his folks’ house. It’s a fortieth wedding anniversary gift.”
“The Morrows have been married that long?”
“I guess so.”
“When do you ever go back to the old neighborhood?”
“Never. But what was I gonna say? ‘Sorry, I don’t want to help you out’? Last Thursday his parents had left the funeral before he could get it from the car. He was heading out of town right after the funeral, so I…”
“Well then, let’s head over.”
My business had just burned down, and I didn’t know where to go. How about back to my childhood?
We crumbled up our wrappers and threw our trash into the McDonald’s parking lot trash bin. I don’t know how A.C. was feeling about heading back to the old neighborhood, but I was feeling kind of conflicted about it all. I had been putting the trip off and was relieved that I would not go to Maple Crest alone.
A few blocks from the old subdivision, we drove past Brookhill Country Club and its empty parking lot. The pool was empty, and the tables and umbrellas had all been stored away for the winter. A big oak tree had fallen over the fence by the diving board.
As we drove into the area, my stomach did a double-large-vanilla-shake flip, and I picked up the gift from the car floor. We drove closer to the cul-de-sac, and I mentally prepared myself to see the Wicker house for the first time in a different light. As much as I felt that I could tell A.C. anything, the news of my relation to the Wicker Witch was something I was not yet ready to share.
“Hey, look!” A.C. pointed to a new sign that welcomed visitors to the subdivision. Maple Hill. They had changed the name of our neighborhood.
“What’s up with that?”
I thought of Octavia. She had told me more than once that change was the sign of the Holy Spirit. That in the old days, Hebrews changed their names following conversion as a symbol of that change. Saul and Paul. Maple Crest and Maple Hill. Had the Holy Spirit been hanging out in our old stomping grounds?
“Check it out, check it out!” A.C. screamed. “Did we really live here? Good Lord, the houses are itty-bitty.” We both started to laugh, A.C.’s hearty laughter drowning out my nervous laughter. Had we really grown up on this circle? My childhood seemed so much bigger.
A.C. drove to the Morrow home and parked on the street in front of the small house. Nobody was home. Stinky had said that if that was the case to take the gift around to the back of the house and put it by the basement door, under the deck in case it rained before his parents got home.
“I’m gonna run this down to their back door,” I told A.C. “I’ll be right back.”
“You sure you don’t want me to? You’ve had a crazy day. I’d do that for you.”
“Nah, I got it.” Stinky had asked me, and I was the guy people felt comfortable asking a favor. The safe guy. I was Ben “You-Can-Count-on-Me” Keller.
I walked around the side of the little, yellow house, wondering how a family with five kids could fit in there. Near the edge of the back covered patio was a rosebush with four or five buds still holding on in November, a week after the ice storm. I put the gift by the door and turned to head back to the front of the house. When I got to the side of the house, I turned around.
I had to see it. I had to see the creek.
I walked to the back edge of the Morrow backyard, right before the pitch became severe and sloped down to the creek. I stood high and looked down low at the sadder, beaten, and broken creek. In my youth, the trees that surrounded the water’s edge had seemed mammoth in size. The creek that I remember, so full of life, had cradled my childhood and later seemingly had stolen a young boy from Omaha who was trying to deliver papers. That same creek later pilfered my innocence by exposing me to an infidelity that shattered my hope that a father could be good. Before danger and sad events, the trees seemed to protect us from the world. Now the trees seemed weak and spindly and empty, many of them broken from the impact of the ice storm.
The creek was not evil.
Bad things had happened at the creek, but that didn’t make the creek bad. The creek wasn’t guilty; it, too, was a victim. A victim like my mother. Like Eddie Krackenier. Like Theresa. Like the man who had once been married to my mother.
Like my father.
We were all victims, just like the creek.
We were all sinners.
My whole life I had feared to find my own dreams. To find myself. If I did, I just might lose myself. And it was to be in that losing of myself, of my business, that I found myself. But in order to lose myself, I had to forgive myself. And it was then that I was carried. By grace, I am certain.
Tom Osborne had written as the last a line of his book On Solid Ground, a line that I’d underlined. “It’s not just children or college football players who deserve a second chance. I believe we all need to be more forgiving and understanding of each other. What each of us does with a second chance is up to us.”
I had forgiven.
I was forgiven.
My cell phone rang as I moved back from the hill. I looked to see who was calling, but I didn’t recognize the number. I decided I should probably get this. Fire station?
“Hello?”
“Ben,” Jenae sobbed. “Ben, do you hate me? Please don’t hate me.” I could hear in her voice that she was in her dark place.
“Jenae?”
“Ben, I did everything you said…I unplugged everything. Everything! Don’t hate me. Don’t leave me!”
“Jenae, Jenae, everything is all right. It’s all fine.”
“But the fire…your business. What are you going to do? Where am I going to go? I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? For saving my life?”
Jenae was silent. Silent for the time ever since I had met her.
“Jenae, listen to me. And listen carefully. You didn’t start the fire.”
“What?”
“You didn’t start the fire, Jenae. And if you had, I would still need to thank you for helping me move on in my life. I’m not so sure that I was ever cut out for this hair thing. Get it? Cut out?” I laughed fully as I looked down at the creek again. “Thank you, Jenae. Thank you.”
Life did exist and flourish beyond the chair. Things would look different without a mirror.
“I don’t understand. You’re leaving us?” Jenae sobbed.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that point the impact my personal decision would have on the staff. After all, Omaha was filled with hair salons.
“You can’t leave me, Ben.” Jenae was sobbing again. “You can’t leave me.”
Jenae and I had an interesting relationship. Though I might have been physically attracted to her for seventeen minutes or so at one time in my life, my love for her had evolved—though I hadn’t known it—through the years into a fatherly love. She had never talked about her father; apparently he had failed her, too. I would always take care of her. I would always be her rock, her hope that a fatherly God might be possible. Jenae looked to me for strength; she looked to me to keep her stable. I was her Mac.
“Jenae, I’m here for you, Toots. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Ben, I need you.”
“Jenae, go take your meds and take a nap. I’ll never leave you. I promise, everything will be just fine.”
“I love you, Ben.”
“Love you, too, Toots.” I ended the call and walked up
the worn path in the lawn alongside the Morrow house. I looked out to my car to see A.C., leaning against the car, holding the envelope with a silly grin on his face.
“The woman really loved you.”
How could he have heard my conversation with Jenae? I was behind the house the whole conversation.
“That old lady really loved you, Ben.” He began waving the envelope through the air.
“What are you talking about?”
“Octavia Edith True Hruska. She remembered you in her will.” He poked the envelope at me. “You been carrying this around just for grins?”
“That’s her will?”
“You haven’t read this? None of it? At least the part that pertains to one Benjamin Howard Keller?” A.C. handed me the envelope on top of which were several typed sheets. “You don’t really need to read through all of the jargon. As your lawyer, I can help you with that, but believe me, she did remember you. Remember her cute, ‘little’ house in the Saint Cecilia Cathedral area? Yours. How ’bout that little old radio station in the Dundee area? Yours. How ’bout a little financial gift to the tune of $250,000?” This time he sang the word in a high-pitched voice: “Yours!”
I was numb.
“So even if you do go to jail—which you won’t—but if you do, you’ll be sitting pretty when you get out of the slammer. Of course, I’d take care of your money and property while you were in prison. As your lawyer, I would do that for you.”
I shook my head slowly. “Wait, what about Truman?”
A.C.’s head went back as he howled in laughter. “Benny, did you not know the lady was loaded? Tom Ducey told me that her son Truman is set for life. You just got a little drop in the bucket. Octavia was sitting on endowment after endowment toward the end of her life. Tom was having a hard time finding where to donate all of that money. According to Tom, she got her will in order when she was still, you know, sharp Octavia…Ben, what’s wrong? Maybe you don’t hear so well: the old lady loved you!”
“So much…”
“You never knew?”
“…to me…”
“You were good to her.” A.C. was more serious. “You were very good to Octavia, Ben.”
Vanity Insanity Page 34
