“I am telling you plainly, Dwayne,” I said, “because you asked plainly.” The father of Ashley is a roofing contractor named Dwayne Holloway, a broad shouldered man with a sunburned neck, and he had put the deed down on the table as if it were a hot skillet. “In September, I sold Brazos Feed and Seed to a supply company in Fort Worth for six million six hundred thousand dollars. A month later, I bought this building through a company of mine. Forty eight apartments. Cole has been paying rent to a man he thought lived in Dallas.” I folded my hands. “The man lives in the back bedroom, Dwayne. He pays seven hundred dollars a month, in cash.”
Nobody spoke. Below the balcony, a mockingbird started up in the live oak, as if nothing in the world were wrong. Cole stood at the grill with the tongs in his fist and a rib eye going black on the grate, and no one reminded him of it. His girlfriend Ashley, a slim, serious girl who teaches third grade, stared at him with her mouth open. “Cole,” she said, “you told me your grandfather lived with you because he could not afford a place.” Cole said, “He cannot.” Dwayne said, “Son, the man owns the place.”
I slid the second paper out of the envelope. The title loan letter, Account 5582, past due, with my name at the top and my signature at the bottom, a loose, looping copy of a signature that I had written ten thousand times on the back of feed checks. “This is not mine, Cole,” I said. “I have signed my name the same way since 1962. Look at the V. Mine has a tail. This one has a hook.” I turned the page toward the light. “Twelve thousand dollars against my Ford. And the lease, down in the office, shows your rent at one thousand fifty. You told me it was fourteen hundred, and that half of it was seven hundred.”
A forged title loan letter brought a roofing contractor to a balcony supper and gave one feed store founder the evening to bring his grandson back to the stockroom.
Cole set down the tongs. He is a handsome young man, with the dark eyes of his grandmother and the unlucky chin of his father, and I have loved him since the day I held him in a hospital blanket and told him, aloud, that I would take care of him. “Grandpa,” he said, “I was drowning. I owed money on the solar contracts, and I did not want Ashley to know. I thought, he has a feed store, he will never miss twelve thousand.” He swallowed. “I told myself I would pay it back before the sale closed. Then the sale closed. And I was ashamed.” His voice cracked. “And I charged you the rent because I needed it.”
Ashley put her hand over her mouth. Dwayne Holloway studied the boy for a long time, with the squint of a man who has seen a lot of bad roofs and a few good ones. “Cole,” he said, finally, “I will tell you what my own father told me when I was twenty three and I wrecked his truck. He said, a mistake is a hole. What matters is whether you climb out or dig deeper.” He turned to me. “Mr. Kubala, what are the terms?” I looked at my grandson, and I thought of Mildred, and how she would have set the table with a damp rag and said, simply, forgive him. I was not ready. But I was willing.
My terms were short. Cole would repay the twelve thousand dollars to the title loan company himself, first, that week, from his savings and from a loan I would cosign. Then he would repay me every dollar of the extra rent, three hundred fifty a month, for two years, which he had charged me over the true cost. He would give me back my truck keys. And on Saturday mornings, he would come with me to my old store on Highway 6, which the new owners had kept, and stock shelves for four hours. “It is honest work,” I said. “It will not make you rich. It will make you a man.”
He wept then. I had not seen him weep since his mother died. He rose from the table in front of his girlfriend and her parents and came around to my chair, and he knelt there on the concrete of the balcony, with his hands on my knees. “Grandpa,” he said, “I am so sorry.” I laid my palm on his head. His hair was warm from the heat of the grill. “I know, son,” I said. “I know it. Get up now. The steaks are burning.” And Ashley laughed, a short wet laugh, and the whole table laughed with her, and the awful night loosened a little.
The first Saturday, Cole showed up at the store at seven sharp. A clerk handed him a box cutter and pointed at a pallet of deer corn. He lifted fifty pound bags until his shirt was dark with sweat. At the end of the shift, a rancher in a straw hat came in for a bag of cattle cubes, saw the boy, and said, “You the grandson of Vernon?” Cole said, “Yes, sir.” The rancher nodded slowly. “Your granddaddy sold me my first bull calf, on credit. Never forgot it.” Cole looked at me across the store, and for a moment he did not say anything at all.
I did not move out of the back bedroom. Cole asked me to stay. He cut the rent to nothing and then, when I refused, to a single dollar a month, which I paid in a Mason jar on the first. Ashley moved in that spring. She hung curtains. She asked me, one evening, over a plate of her excellent enchiladas, what Mildred had been like, and I talked until the dishes were cold. He had never heard half of it. “Why did you never tell me?” he asked. I said, “You never asked.”
On the first anniversary of that supper, Cole drove me out to the old lot on Highway 6 and handed me a sack. Inside was a brass key, the new key to the Ford, and a small wooden sign, hand painted in green letters: Kubala Feed, since 1974. “I made it myself,” he said. “It is not very straight.” I held it up in the sun. It leaned a little to the left, like a man who had come a long way, and the paint had run at the edge of the K. “It is perfect,” I said. I hung it on the nail beside the door of the store, and it has hung there ever since.
