The further I got away from having deposited the money, the more relaxed with it I was starting to feel.
Brandon was paid up in school through the next semester. Our house was current. I even got a call from the TV station I’d interviewed with that they wanted me back for a second interview. Okay, the job paid forty thousand less than what I was previously making, but if I could get the house out from under me, and maybe rent something smaller, closer to Brandon’s school, the savings on taxes and expenses alone would make up much of the difference.
I was beginning to feel that there was an outcome for us here other than total disaster. I still checked online every day for anything that might’ve come up on the missing money or on Kelty. If he’d been implicated in anything that might shed some light on it.
But so far it appeared he hadn’t been.
I did find one mention in the Staten Island Advance about a fund that was being set up in his name. By his son to help people in Midland Beach, the proceeds coming from a softball game in the spring between policemen and firemen on Staten Island. And there was also a memorial fund started by his fellow MTA workers.
I gradually began to convince myself that I might just get away with it. No one seemed to be looking for it. No one even seemed to know. It was actually as if this lifesaving cache had simply fallen into my lap. That Joe Kelty was my guardian angel. I knew there were people connected to him who needed this money even more than I did. And I swore to myself, as soon as I was back on my feet, with a new job and a trimmed-down overhead, as soon I could create some distance from what I’d done, I’d find a way to get a good part of it back to them. Anonymously, of course. Maybe through that fund his son was setting up.
And it made the wrong feel better that ultimately I would put the money to good use. Help people rebuild. Become a kind of guardian angel myself.
Yes, the further it all faded into the past that feeling put some peace in me.
It just didn’t last for even another day.