The Insurance Company Gave My Best Friend’s Widow 30 Days to Prove He Signed His $1 Million Policy

Floyd Ambrose answered the door himself, in a cardigan and slippers, with a magnifying glass on a cord around his neck.

He was small and stooped. His eyes were sharp as tacks.

“Delahoya,” he repeated, when I explained. “Delahoya.”

He shuffled into the living room and sat in his recliner. His daughter brought coffee and gave me a look that said, Don’t get your hopes up.

“I wrote three thousand policies in fifty-three years,” Floyd said. “You expect me to remember one?”

“He was thirty-three. Big laugh. He’d have brought you something. Tony always brought something.”

Floyd’s eyes narrowed.

“Grape juice,” he said slowly. “Homemade. In a mason jar. Tasted like feet.”

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled the coffee. That was Tony’s grape juice.

“Did you keep copies, Mr. Ambrose? Of the applications?”

“Young man,” he said, offended, “I kept a carbon copy of every form I ever filled out. The company lost their papers all the time. I never lost one.”

“Where are they?”

He pointed his magnifying glass at the back door.

“Garage.”

There were ninety-one banker’s boxes in that garage, stacked to the rafters. We started at noon. Floyd sat in a lawn chair and directed us like a traffic cop. His daughter and I opened box after box.

At six o’clock, his daughter pulled out a yellowed folder and handed it to me.

DELAHOYA, ANTHONY R. 2009. BENEFICIARY CHANGE.

There was the form. There was Tony’s signature, big and sloppy, like always.

And underneath it, on the line marked Witness, was a second signature I knew even better.

Mine.