3

The thief and the poet

After the ingredients are combined, baking is largely waiting. The pans go in the oven. After that, they come out and cool.

For the cake she was making that afternoon, Molly included twice-toasted hazelnuts, meaning that she toasted them first in a pan, then ground the nuts into a fine paste, and then toasted the paste before folding it into the batter. Her oven expelled a rich aroma, as if the air, too, had been toasted to a light golden brown. With the baking commenced, Molly sat down at her breakfast table and continued her story.

Molly’s parents divorced when she was 8. She stayed with her mother; her older sister moved in with her father.

By this time, Molly had learned to be suspicious of Joe.

One summer, he took her on a vacation to Mexico and booked a room with a beachfront view. On the first morning there, he handed her a $20 bill and left her behind at the hotel. She wandered the halls, aimless and abandoned and unsure of what to think. When he did reappear, it was only to hand her a little more lunch money and disappear again. This cycle of appearance and disappearance, of feigned generosity to hide something else, began to define their relationship.

He told stories that she knew could not be true. There were strange occurrences, hard for a child to understand: new cars that seemed to come and go with the week; his angry fixation with certain sports; the way he’d watch two or three games, televisions stacked together, at the same time. On occasion, men would come looking for him, though they wouldn’t say why.

It was around this time that Molly began to read, to discover the world within books.

“I spent a lot of time alone as a child, so books were everything for me,” she said. “When you’re young, a lot of what you’re reading is about family or friendship or cooperation, those are values that tend to be emphasized, and those things didn’t make sense in my life. I never felt satisfied with fiction. There was too much moralizing in stories. I wanted, rather, to just learn things.”

She discovered poetry, the vast universe of language that can be contained inside of books. With her home life in turmoil, she retreated inside of herself. She challenged her teachers, refusing to play along with assignments she deemed dumb. Nora, concerned for her daughter, sent her to a counselor. One summer, when she was 11, Molly was sent to an Amish camp, “a place for troubled kids.” Molly writes, “Since I knew I didn’t cause trouble to anyone – I supposed, then, that I was the trouble that needed to be removed.”

When Molly was 13, she and her mother had just returned home from a short vacation together when Nora received a phone call. After she hung up, Nora called Molly into the kitchen and told her that her father had been arrested.

“What did he do?” Molly asked.

“Robbed banks,” Nora said.

For most anyone, to hear those words would be the moment when a life turned upside down. Undoubtedly, the revelation of Joe’s crimes changed the course of her family’s lives. But standing next to her mother that night, Molly remembers, “It didn’t feel like some kind of mistake, like it sometimes feels when you don’t want to believe what’s happened. It was horrible how easy it was to accept.”

On the local news, Joe became known as the Mario Bros. Bandit, named for his disguise that included a fake mustache, glasses, a cap. He never brought a gun or made a scene. He just passed the tellers a note and walked away with cash. He used it all to pay gambling debts. Investigators charged him with 11 robberies. He was sentenced to 10 years.

Molly searched for a way forward. With her father in prison, life was more calm, less disrupted. She and her mother lived in a house for four years, longer than she had ever lived in one place in her life. She threw herself into chemistry in high school, but upon graduation decided to pursue a degree in illustration at Savannah College of Art and Design, far away from the state she’d grown up in.

She intended to write and illustrate children’s books, but as she studied, she found herself spending longer and longer on the writing, and less time on the illustration. So she left art school, moved back to Michigan. She worked jobs and took classes at Oakland College, slowly working her way to a degree in English. It was a painful path, she says, trying to figure out how to be a writer.

“When you tell a regular person you’re a poet, it’s like saying you’re a unicorn,” she says. “It sounds so old-fashioned. It’s this title you can’t really be.”

While Molly was in college, Joe was released early from prison after serving seven years. He got his job back at GM. For a time, it seemed, things were becoming normal. Her sister worked at a bank. After graduating from Oakland College, Molly moved to University of West Virginia to get an MFA in poetry.

But in 2009, while Molly was in graduate school, Joseph robbed another bank. And this time he’d brought a gun. The teller gave him a bag of cash with an exploding dye pack inside. He was chased by a customer. The scene was a scandal in the papers, the latest chapter in the Mario Bros. Bandit saga. Joe was convicted again, sentenced to 10 years, just like the last time.