Betrayal In Blood. Michael Benson
And still Kevin wasn’t making ends meet and she had to work. After a time she had to work two jobs. Kevin’s folks looked after the babies a lot. In addition to her duties at Kevin’s office, Tabby took a second job as a teller at the Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company Bank (M & T Bank) in Perinton. As a teller she worked the “drive-thru” window, and gave lollipops to drivers who turned up their radios so she could better hear the music.
On weekends she sometimes chose not to be with Kevin and Kevin’s friends. Instead, she would pack the kids in the car and head down to Greenwood. Actually, Tabby already returned regularly to Steuben County on weekends, both before and after she had her boys. She would visit her family and attend her old church in Greenwood. According to her old boss Andy Carbone, she often made a point of stopping back at J.C.’s Café to say hello to her old customers and coworkers.
Befitting her position as the wife of the boss, and mother of the boss’s children, Tabby was promoted to head secretary at Kevin’s office.
CHAPTER 14
Tackle Frisbee
Letchworth State Park, “the Grand Canyon of the East,” is thirty-five miles south of Rochester. It is certainly one of the most scenic places in New York State. The park lies beside the Genesee River Gorge, which is more than six hundred feet deep in some places, overlooking the river as it courses past three major waterfalls between cliffs. Picnicking, camping, hiking, and horseback riding are some of the preferred activities.
When Essie Bassett heard that Ginny was coming for a visit and bringing Chris, she knew where they should go: Letchworth. And so, it was at this park that the Winebrenners and Bassetts, two families with Ginny in common, decided to hold their 2001 reunion.
During July 2001, the Winebrenners—Cleo, Ginny, and Chris (Cyril stayed in Iowa with his wife and son)—came to New York State to celebrate Chris’s eighteenth birthday. Ginny took Chris to visit his sisters in New York. The Winebrenners stayed at Kevin and Tabby’s house in Penfield and drove down to meet Samantha at the park.
Only on one occasion, that Ginny can remember, did all four of her children get together in one place. The girls were visiting Graceland University for a church event and Cyril and Chris visited them there.
Samantha admitted a few years later she had not really known her brothers very well. She, for one, was not disappointed that Cyril hadn’t come. She described Cyril as “not my favorite person. He was arrogant, even when I first knew him when he was younger. He was kind of a know-it-all, and I usually don’t like people like that.”
For the visit to New York during summer 2001, the focus was on Chris, the birthday boy. Both of the girls brought Chris a birthday present, wrapped and festooned with bows.
“For his birthday we bought him a new outfit and took him to New York [State]. It was Chris’s vacation and part birthday present,” Ginny said. “Sammy bought him a little jeweled knife. Tabby bought him a shirt with a dragon on it. He had such a blast.”
At Letchworth, alongside the Genesee River Gorge, they had a cookout and a picnic. But the thing that everyone remembered best and most fondly about the day was when the Bassett girls and Chris, along with Tabby and Kevin’s son K.C., played a rollicking game of what they called “tackle Frisbee.” It started out as normal frisbee, the girls and Chris just throwing the disc around, playing catch. Then Chris began to intercept throws that were supposed to go from Tabby to Sam or from Sam to Tabby. Tackle frisbee, as it turned out, had no rules. Most of the action involved both girls and K.C. ganging up on Chris to get him off his feet.
“He was so much taller than the girls that he could just reach up and grab the frisbee. After a while of that, the girls decided that they were going to get even, and they tackled him to get the Frisbee away from him,” Ginny recalled. “Then little K.C. would jump in the middle and pretty soon everybody was tackling everybody—gently, of course. They were having one heck of a good time.”
The next day they all went to Niagara Falls and crossed over into Canada, where they visited Marineland Park.
“We visited flea markets that day,” Ginny recalled. “It was a little bit of here, there, and everywhere.”
Sammy’s boyfriend at the time was a stock car driver at Woodhull Raceway, a small Southern Tier dirt track. One evening they went to the track to see him race. That visit would turn out to be the last time that the Bassett girls would get to play and interact with their brother Chris.
CHAPTER 15
A Bad One
In 2001, Chris Winebrenner lived with his brother, Cyril, for a couple of months.
“While they were staying together, they had gotten into an argument. I don’t know what it was about. I never asked. I figured that was between the boys,” Ginny said.
Chris moved back to Minnesota, living not far from home, and was working at a McDonald’s. Cyril was working at Lakeside Casino, in Osceola, Iowa. He was a dealer there.
Ginny’s sister Denise and her husband, Jimmy, both worked at the Lakeside Casino. Denise was a dealer and Jimmy worked security.
“Cyril got hired on and he wanted to be a dealer. That’s what he got hired on for, and they trained him. He could deal all the games,” Ginny said.
It was autumn; Thanksgiving approached.
“My husband had gone deer hunting, and he came back on a Friday,” Ginny said. “That Sunday, Chris was going to stop over and see him before he went to work at McDonald’s. Well, they called him in early at McDonald’s, so Chris called us and said he’d see us afterward.
“Well, we heard the helicopters go, and me and Cleo were saying, ‘That must have been a bad one.’ About an hour and a half later, we got a call from the hospital that Chris had been hurt in a head-on collision. They thought we should get there right away.”
They got in the car and Cleo somehow managed to drive down to the hospital. Chris was in the intensive-care trauma unit. He had been driving a compact car and had crashed head-on with a truck. He was being treated for massive trauma to the head.
“For the first three days, they said we couldn’t talk to him, and we couldn’t touch him. The only thing we could do was go in once a day and say, ‘Hi. We’re here. We love you.’ That was it. We couldn’t actually touch him because he would react. And with the head injury, they didn’t want the added stimulation.
“Cyril couldn’t get there until Wednesday night. That was the same time my daughters got there. I had called them and told them he wasn’t going to make it. So they were all there. Cleo and me hadn’t had any sleep, so they sent us home, and we wanted someone there all the time.
“By Wednesday evening they said we could talk to him all we wanted. He could have visitors. And on Thursday morning, he died—and that was Thanksgiving Day,” Ginny said.
Samantha recalled, “Mom called to tell us that Chris had been in an accident. He was in ICU. Tab and I flew out. They said for a time that he was getting better. Then he wasn’t and they said there was nothing they could do and it was just a matter of time. So we took off his life support, and he died.”
The whole family gathered for Chris’s funeral. Ginny’s dad was there, and the man, who had spent a lifetime in industrial hard-facing, was not acting himself. He recently had been diagnosed as suffering from dementia.
“My dad was there, even though he wasn’t too sure who I was,” Ginny said, adding that his senility was “only getting worse.”
Chris’s November 27, 2001, obituary in the Elk River Star News & Shopper read:
Christopher L. “Chris” Winebrenner, 18, of Mount Ayr, Iowa, formerly of Big Lake, died Thursday, November 22, 2001, as a result of an automobile accident. His funeral service was held November 24 at Dare’s Funeral Service in Elk River. He is survived