John had begun missing deadlines. Because of Next Step’s reputation and relationships, many of the smaller foundations—donating a grand here, three grand there—would still accept a proposal a few days late and a bit fuzzy around the edges.
But Betty Stienke was not to be messed with. Dead since 1967, as a girl she married into a tannery empire that thrived in the Midwest for nearly one hundred years, and she died with millions. The Betty S. Stienke Foundation hovered over the philanthropic landscape as one of the richest sources of human services funding in southeast Wisconsin for decades, and Next Step earned tens of thousands of dollars every year from the foundation’s long-serving and ruthlessly inflexible foundation manager.
Every year when it came time to reapply to Stienke, John felt the future of the agency—and the lives of those they tried to help—riding on his shoulders as he hunkered down and ground out the complicated grant proposal. He never failed to bring in the money.
But this year Stienke fell right in the thick of his Larry dilemma, and John cut corners. Five days past deadline, he finally cobbled together entire blocks of text from previous grants and knocked it out while sitting at Larry’s bedside in the middle of the night. The budget he included with the funding request was a lazy approximation of predicted revenue and expenses.
It ate at John to turn in something so slipshod, but he gambled that almost two decades of a productive relationship between foundation and agency would earn him a pass for an off year. When Stienke came around again in twelve months, Larry would be gone and John’s head would be back in the game.
* * *
He was asleep on his couch when Fred Kirby, Next Step’s executive director, called and told him he needed to see him right away.
“What happened with Stienke?” Fred began gravely as soon as John sat down in his shambles of an office.
Past retirement age, Fred was a supremely decent man and as close to a father figure as John had ever allowed himself. It was Fred who trusted John to set his own hours and meet his deadlines without oversight, and John never let him down. So he despaired to hear the uneasy tone in his boss’s voice.
“I told Kurt Stamper that I was going to be a few days past deadline,” John squirmed. “He was his usual grouchy self, but he was okay with it. Is he saying—?”
Fred held the proposal in his hand. Seeing a printed copy for the first time, half the thickness of a typical Stienke appeal, John’s heart sank at what he tried to get away with.
“What is this?” Fred asked plaintively. “This is not what we turn in to them.”
John went gray with regret. “There were things going on, at home. I had a lot of things on my plate, and…”
“I told Stamper you must have just emailed the wrong file,” Fred continued hopefully. “This is a draft. Right?”
“Look,” John protested weakly. “They know what we do here. They know we’ve never been anything other than one-hundred-percent responsible with their money. They expect us to jump through the same hoops for them every year, but just because—”
Fred flipped through the pages with alarm. “These are just pieces of past proposals. You didn’t even take out the other funder’s name on one page.” Fred held it up; a crotchety circle was scrawled around the offending word. Kurt Stamper had caught John not even bothering to use search and replace to catch the mistake.
John winced and sagged.
“The foundation is spending down. They’re cutting back on who they’re supporting until the funds are gone. And now we’ve fallen off their automatic renewal list,” Fred said gravely. “He’s sending us to the board for review. They’re going to be looking at us closely, asking a lot of questions.
“In this economy, if they decide there are other agencies who are doing what we do more efficiently … We could lose this.”
John’s face burned with regret. Fred studied him with personal concern that undercut this perilous threat to the agency.
“How did this happen?” the old man asked patiently. “What’s going on?”
“It’s just…” John sighed. More than once he longed to unburden himself to Fred about his father, knowing that he could trust Fred with a secret.
“I’m just going through a rough patch at home,” he said.
“I knew your marriage was having some problems,” Fred offered sympathetically.
“Well, you know,” John said, sitting up defensively. “When you’re married for a long time, things change, but that doesn’t mean that…” He trailed off, realizing that the only cover he had was marital discord.
“We’ve been working through some things, but I think we’re going to be fine. It’s just been … hard.”
“I understand,” Fred said sincerely, before rattling the meager pages of the Stienke proposal. “But, John, this is serious.” Fred had been dealing with health problems and John knew he had been trying to find a successor since before the economy went bad. If they lost one of their top funders, finding someone to take over for him would be impossible.
“We have nothing to fear going before their board,” John said confidently. “We do good work here. It’s about time they take a closer look at us, to see what all we’re accomplishing with not a hell of a lot of money.
“Things are so tough out there, they might decide they want to give us—”
Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” rumbled out of John’s pants. Mike almost never called; something had to be up. John squirmed awkwardly as he tried to fish his cell from his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Fred. “I really need to…”
He answered the phone. “Hey, I need to call you back. I’m in the middle of—”
“You need to get down to the mall,” Mike cut in sharply. “Right now.”
John met his boss’s eye with unease. “Can’t you deal with it?”
“No. She went over to Macy’s with Mrs. Ludlow and store security called and said I had to get over here and … I’m not dealing with this shit alone.”
John grimaced. “I’ll be right there.”
He hung up and stood. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded to Fred. “I’m on the tail end of resolving this. I won’t let you down again. But…”
“Go,” Fred said.
“Stienke’s going to be fine.”
“I hope so.”
* * *
A store employee led John through housewares, intimate apparel, and travel accessories. The store on a Monday morning was sterile and half-empty. The piped in music played Céline Dion. Her heart was going on.
They moved from the customer side of the operation to the airless row of management offices. Passing a lounge area partitioned by a large window, John saw his mother sitting alone on a bank of vinyl chairs. Mrs. Ludlow, a neighbor since the day the family moved into the house decades ago, sat apart from her, looking ashen and unsure.
Rose sat compactly, staring at her hands.
Instead of being taken to her, John followed the assistant manager around a corner to find Mike, pacing agitatedly with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His usual shabbiness clashed particularly harshly with the antiseptic corporate offices.
Mike came alive at seeing his brother. “What the fuck, man? What took you so long?”
“What happened?” John asked.
Mike was coiled to flee. He’d already heard the whole story. “Look, you’re gonna have to—”
A door marked STORE SECURITY opened and a middle-aged man with a kind face emerged. He seemed relieved to see John but reticent to proceed following a tepid handshake. “You must be Rose’s other son. I’m Ted Reichard, the manager here. Please, come in.”
He gestured both brothers into the security room. Having missed his chance to escape, Mike warily followed John in.
The security room lacked any air of covert mystery whatsoever, just a cramped little nook off the employee lunchroom. Monitors over a video deck showed vulnerable corners of the store. Shoppers blandly went about their business as cameras spied on them.
John and Mike were directed to sit in the two chairs at the security console. The manager stood as he proceeded. He couldn’t have known that Mike hadn’t had time to tell John what happened.
“We are trying to be as sensitive to this as possible,” he began. “We know your mother has her challenges, and I can’t imagine how embarrassing this is for her.
“But when she became upset and started threatening lawsuits over how we have dealt with the situation, it became my job to protect the store’s interests. I think you should watch what happened, and then we can talk about where we go from here.”
John squirmed as Mike stared at the floor.
The manager pushed a button and one of the monitors played back silent, grainy images from a dressing room. The camera was trained on an empty stall as a store employee walked past.
On the tape, a customer emerged from behind a closed stall door, looking displeased with what she tried on. John leaned in as Rose and Mrs. Ludlow walked into view, each with prospective purchases draped over their arms. Rose loved to shop; even without the audio, John could see that she was in good spirits. She tried to chipperly follow Mrs. Ludlow into her dressing room before being redirected into a stall of her own. She closed the door behind her.
The voyeuristic queasiness grew as Rose’s feet, a few inches apart, showed through the gap below the stall door. She appeared to sit down. Her feet were still, apart from some unsteady shifting, then she slid down her clothes and they balled up at her ankles.
A deathly few moments passed, and then a customer walking past the fitting rooms slipped before catching herself.
She looked down, then registered disgust as she examined her shoes. She studied Rose’s closed door with incomprehension, walked out of view for several moments, then returned with a young store employee. Both tried to avoid the puddle.
The angle and the quality of the image muted the full reality of it, but it was obvious what happened. John’s heart constricted.
On the video playback, the store employee delicately knocked on the stall door. Rose’s feet shuffled unsteadily before she opened the door, the camera for a moment catching her pulling up her skirt and realizing that everything was soaked in urine. The store worker was admirable for her discretion and kind handling, but Rose was obviously confused and mortified.
“My sister had Alzheimer’s,” Reichard said softly. “I can imagine what happened. Your Mom was overstimulated from being at the mall, she steps alone into a stall, she disrobes. She just forgot where she was, that’s all.”
Seeing Rose’s stricken face on the video, cornered and ashamed in that tiny room, was too much for Mike as he bolted from the room.
On the monitor, Mrs. Ludlow stepped into view. Quickly assessing the situation, she attempted to step into the stall with Rose and close the door behind them, but Rose quickly became obstinate.
Either to deflect her embarrassment or in a true inability to process what was happening, she began lashing out at everyone. Embarrassed shoppers moved past, trying to avoid the crazy lady, as Reichard himself appeared on the tape to try and gracefully defuse the situation. His concern and gentle touch was clear.
Mrs. Ludlow finally got Rose alone in the stall and closed the door. An employee quickly brought fresh clothes.
“We got her cleaned up as quick as we could,” Reichard said. “We got her fresh clothes, which we are happy to let her keep. I believe that we handled a sensitive situation as delicately as we possibly could, but … She was really angry before we were able to calm her down.”
John wasn’t listening anymore.
* * *
He stepped from the security office. He was not surprised to not see Mike with their mother, looking tinier than ever.
Mrs. Ludlow smiled at John before leaving the two of them alone. John sat down beside Rose and put his arm around her.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello,” she said defeatedly. He kissed her temple. They sat in silence for a moment.
“I had to see a man about a horse,” Rose finally said simply.
“Sounds like,” he smiled as he pulled her closer.
She smiled, too, but then sagged. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. They fell silent again, neither anxious to leave. To have to walk back out through the mall, forever garish and carefree, felt cruel.
He finally rubbed her back. “It’s past lunchtime, you must be starving. Let’s go to Rocky’s. My treat.”
He stood, but she pulled away.
“Mom. Nobody is ever going to know.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Nobody will know,” he said firmly, offering his hand. “I promise.”