Chapter 12 - The Payment Under the Sawdust
I called Dad before eight the next morning. He was already at the workshop. When I asked about the $21,600 payment, he told me to come in.
"Bring the statement," he said. "I want to look at the date."
Ethan offered to drive, but I went alone. I needed to hear Dad's answer without a witness I might hide behind. The shop smelled of pine and the coffee Ruth brewed too strong. Dad took me to his office and pulled an invoice from a crowded drawer.
It was for cabinetry and service counters installed at the Juniper Room eighteen months earlier. His shop had completed the job, invoiced Lauren's company, and waited six months to be paid. Diane had eventually arranged a transfer. Dad had assumed it came from Lauren's business account.
"Did you check?" I asked.
"I saw the Juniper Room name on the remittance advice."
"The statement Lauren sent me shows an old pantry account."
Dad looked at the paper for a long time. "That isn't right."
"What did you do when the invoice was overdue?"
"I asked Lauren to pay it. Diane said she'd handle it. Then the deposit came through."
"Did you tell the pantry you were doing work for them?"
"No. It was commercial cabinetry. They didn't order it."
He called his accountant with me present. The accountant checked the deposit and confirmed that the routing information corresponded to the old Bright Table account used before the nonprofit had changed banks. It appeared the payment had been labeled as a Juniper Room project in the shop's accounting system because Dad's bookkeeper followed the remittance memo. None of that established who had authorized the nonprofit's money to be used.
"Can you send the invoice and the deposit record to the independent reviewer?" I asked.
Dad looked stricken. "The money came in. We paid employees with it."
"Then that's part of the record. Nobody gets to rewind time."
He nodded. "I'll tell Victor and the accountant. If the pantry is owed money, we need a plan."
I wanted him to say he'd make the pantry whole immediately. But I knew the shop couldn't simply pull twenty-one thousand dollars out of its account without jeopardizing payroll. The honest next step was to establish what had happened and who was responsible, then work out repayment. I let him say exactly that instead of demanding a heroic promise he couldn't keep.
Ruth knocked and came in carrying a payroll schedule. She heard the last sentence and looked at Dad.
"If the shop received money from a charity that didn't owe it, we can't pretend the invoice vanished," she said. "We can still figure out how to keep the doors open."
"That's what we're going to do," Dad answered.
His voice was steadier than it had been on Christmas night. I wondered how much of his apparent helplessness had been fear of Diane, and how much had been the convenience of letting other people ask the difficult questions.
I drove straight to Mara's office. She said the payment could be relevant to the independent accounting, but that we shouldn't assume the shop knowingly received misdirected funds. Dad's records and the account authorizations would matter. She forwarded the documents to the proper counsel with his consent.
"Your family has a habit of mixing transactions that should stay separate," Mara said. "A loan between you and your father, a supplier guarantee, commercial renovation invoices, and nonprofit donations are four different matters. Somebody keeps treating them as one pot of money."
"My mother," I said.
"The records will tell us who did what. Let them."
I tried to follow that advice when Lauren called that afternoon. She wanted to meet at a diner, without Diane. I agreed on the condition that she bring her lawyer if she intended to discuss confidential financial records. She said she hadn't hired one yet.
"Then we can talk about us," I said. "Not negotiate the case."
At the diner, she ordered tea and didn't touch it. We sat in a booth near a window streaked with road salt.
"Grandma June left me money," she said. "I went to the executor's office. I found the papers."
I waited.
"Sixty thousand dollars. It paid off my student loans and part of the design-school tuition Mom had covered. She showed me those bills when I moved home. I signed the distribution papers."
"Then why tell me she left you nothing?"
"Because Mom kept saying you were the one who got the real inheritance. I knew I'd received something, but I let the story become that you got everything and I got a bill. It made me feel better about asking for help."
"I didn't take your share."
"I know that now. Maybe I knew it then."
A waitress refilled our mugs. I remembered two sisters sitting cross-legged on June's carpet, trying to thread needles with more confidence than skill. June hadn't loved us like bookkeepers balancing two identical columns. She'd known we wanted different things. I had saved my inheritance for years. Lauren had used hers for education and then risked money she didn't have to open a business. None of that entitled Diane to turn our choices against each other.
"Mom said you were always careful because you were afraid to live," Lauren said.
"And what did she say about you?"
Lauren looked down. "That I was brave enough to dream, but not competent enough to do it without her."
There was the hook we had both swallowed: one daughter was too cautious to deserve anything; the other was too reckless to manage it. Neither was allowed to make a decision without Diane defining it.
Lauren lifted her tea. "I'm getting a lawyer tomorrow. I'll give the accountant the notebook. I don't know what happens after that."
"Neither do I."
"Are you going to tell Mom what we talked about?"
"No. It's your conversation to have."
She looked relieved, which made the next question harder.
"Emily, did Dad ever tell you he signed an agreement to sell his shop building if the venue failed?"
My heart kicked. "He said the guarantee could put the building at risk. Why?"
May you like
Lauren slid an email across the table. Diane had sent it to the supplier, promising that Robert's real estate would be available to satisfy the debt before the company sought other financing.
The email ended with the words: He will cooperate. He always does.
