Dewey's Nine Lives

In his spare time, he trained to be a cop. There was no police academy in Sioux City in those days. Studying to be a policeman meant experiencing it, strictly volunteer, with a senior officer. Glenn rode in a squad car for a year. He called on domestic disturbances. He was in car chases. He talked angry, drunk, and angry-drunk people out of foolish decisions. He was good. But police work didn’t pay. So when his second son was born, he took a job at his father-in-law’s insurance office. He was even better at selling insurance, he soon realized, than he had been at police work. He knew how to put people at ease. He was enormous, but he wasn’t intimidating. I am reminded of the words used to describe a commander from the Second World War, who also happened to be from Iowa: “[He] was a leader—quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong . . . One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed.” You wanted to buy, in other words, what Glenn Albertson was selling—whether it was an insurance policy or a Sunday school lesson—because you believed in him. And you knew he believed what he said. Glenn Albertson, people could see right away, was a stand-up guy.

Honesty and openness served him well, and by the time Glenn was thirty, he was making seventy thousand dollars a year selling insurance. He had a house in the suburbs on the far side of Rose Hill, with four bedrooms, a huge deck, and a white fence that ran all the way around the yard. There was peewee football with his oldest son, Indian Guides with his middle boy, and his infant daughter to hold in his arms in the still of the night and wonder at the miracle of life. His wife tended to use the smoke alarm for her cooking timer, so Glenn often prepared the evening meals, too. He took his boys with him everywhere: on errands to the gas station or the grocery store, and almost every Saturday to the garage where he rebuilt the hot rod cars he liked to race. He even had a big happy dog named Maggie. The boys would run around with her in the neatly trimmed backyard while Glenn laughed from his big back porch and turned the burgers on the grill.

On Sunday, they went to church. Not a new-style megachurch but an old-fashioned church in a building that was beautiful for its simplicity and modesty. The services were no-frills, and the community was so small, Glenn became the Sunday school teacher for every kid in the congregation, from toddler to twelfth grade. Only three boys were interested in the basketball team, so Glenn recruited a few kids from the neighborhood, who turned out to be a Sioux City melting pot of Greek, African American, and Native American, and told them they could play basketball as long as they attended church every Sunday. Those boys became Glenn’s extended family, too. There was nothing, Glenn Albertson would have said, that hard work and a good attitude and genuine love couldn’t solve.

And then his daughter Kari got a fever.

She was only six months old, and the girls in Sunday school loved to hold her. It was a typical bone-cold winter Sunday, all fifteen kids running ragged, when one of the girls came over to Glenn and said, “Kari’s hot.”

Glenn felt his baby’s head. It was burning. “I’m taking her home,” he said.

He trundled the boys into the car and started up Rose Hill. It was snowing heavily, and the world was hazy and white. Coming around the last corner, Glenn could barely make out the vehicle blocking his driveway. He pulled around to the front, tucked his daughter deep into a blanket, and ran her up to the door.

He couldn’t reach his keys with his daughter in his arms, so he rang the doorbell. His wife was home sick, so she should have been able to let them in, but she didn’t answer.

He rang again. The boys were at his side, shivering in their heavy jackets. He pulled the blanket close around his daughter. No answer.

He rang. And rang. And rang.

Finally, the door opened. It wasn’t his wife. It was one of his best friends.

“Where’s my wife?” he said.

“She’s in the shower,” his friend said.

The marriage was over at that very moment. The trust—the bedrock of Glenn’s existence—was gone. He hung around for a few months, never talked about what had happened, but the white fence and the four-bedroom house and the happy life had all dissolved into the cold of that snowy Sunday morning.

They got divorced. He moved out of the house and into a bachelor apartment, hardly a stick of furniture in the place. Soon after, he arrived early at the insurance office, to discover that his key no longer worked. His former in-laws had changed the locks.