“To a company that specializes in event rentals, Kurt, in July,” I said, and I laid my hand flat on the schedule. “Kubiak Tent and Event was sold for six million six hundred thousand dollars. Every tent, every truck, every chair. Line thirty one is the box truck with the forty by sixty frame tent rolled inside. Your son has it behind his garage with a price on the door, and he told Pat that I had approved the sale. I approved nothing. Cody had a key and a story, and he drove it away on a Sunday night.” The polka band had stopped, and a small child holding a pretzel looked up at her father and asked why everyone was so still.
Cody lifted both hands. “Uncle Norbert, I was only borrowing it until my company got on its feet. I was going to bring it back.” “Pat called me this morning,” I said. “He told me you took two more tents and three hundred chairs as well. That is four pieces of equipment. The buyer has a lawyer, and the lawyer has a list, and by Monday morning that list will have your name on it.” I looked around the backyard at three hundred guests in lederhosen, holding steins. “You told them all that I was washed up, Cody. I put up the tent over your wedding. I never said a word about that, either.”
Karen came and stood beside me. She laid her hand on my arm, and I could feel her trembling. Kurt stepped down off the picnic table slowly. “Cody, you told me your uncle wanted you to have the business. You said he was tired and wanted someone to carry on.” “I thought he would never find out,” Cody whispered. Kurt put his liter of Warsteiner down in the grass. He looked at his son, and then he looked at me, and I saw a man doing arithmetic he did not like. Somewhere behind us a sausage hissed on the grill, and no one moved to turn it.
A forty by sixty frame tent with a price on its door gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the party in Fort Wayne.
I kept my voice steady, the way I steady a pole in a high wind. “Here are my terms. By Sunday night the box truck, the frame tent, the two other tents and every chair go back to the warehouse on Coliseum Boulevard. Pat checks each item against the schedule. Cody pays for the fuel and the hauling. The sign comes off the roll up door tonight. And the name Hollenbeck Party Rentals does not get filed, not this year, not next, without a letter from the buyer. If everything comes home in good shape, I will let it be. I would rather have a nephew than a lawsuit.”
On Sunday morning I drove to the warehouse, and I found a surprise waiting. Pat had told the crew, and sixty two of my seasonal workers, men and women who had hauled canvas for me for years, were standing in the lot with coffee and kolaches. Nobody had asked them to come. They helped Cody unload the truck, and they carried that frame tent back to its rack as though it were an altar cloth. A weathered rigger named Gus took off his cap and said, “Norbert, you gave my son his first job, and my daughter her second. We were not going to let this stand.”
The money consequences were not mild. Kurt had co signed the lease on the garage and the loan for the new trucks, and the bank called both on Monday. He had to sell two cars off the lot at a loss, and for the first time in thirty six years the biggest dealer in Allen County sat in his own office staring at a stack of overdue bills. The supplier of tent stakes and lights who had extended credit to Hollenbeck Party Rentals sent an invoice for twenty nine thousand dollars. The banner that read Coming Soon ended up in a dumpster behind the car wash on Lima Road.
I did not want to turn bitter. With part of the sale money, I started a fund for the people who build the festivals of this town. The Kubiak Events Fund pays for training, tools and a first season of work gloves for any young person in Allen County who wants to learn rigging, carpentry and lighting for outdoor events. Eighteen students signed up in the first month. I told them that I had started with one forty by forty canvas and a borrowed pickup, and that the best sound in the world is the applause after a roof you raised stays up in the rain.
Kurt came to my house on a Thursday evening, alone, with a six pack of Warsteiner. He sat on the porch step with his hat in his hands. For thirty six years, he said, he had called me the tent guy because he was afraid I was better at my life than he was at his. I told him I had always been a little afraid of the showroom floor, with all those mirrors. He laughed so hard that he coughed. Then he cried, a little, quietly, in the dark. We sat on the porch and finished the six pack, and by midnight we were brothers in law again.
Cody reported to the warehouse at five in the morning on the first Monday, as I had asked. Pat handed him a pair of gloves and pointed to a sixty by one twenty that needed to be folded after the rain. It took eleven men to fold, and Cody was one of them. By lunch his shirt was soaked through, and his hands were blistered. At the lunch bench, Pat slid a thermos toward him. “It is not about the tent, kid,” he said. “It is about the people under it.” Cody nodded slowly and drank his coffee, and I watched from the doorway, and I saw him grow up a little.
The following Oktoberfest, the whole family gathered again on the lawn. The sky was a blue so deep it hurt, and the leaves were red and gold along the fence. Cody ran the new forty by sixty himself, with Pat at his shoulder, and when the last pole went up he stood back with his hands on his hips and grinned. Kurt raised a stein from the picnic table. “To Norbert,” he said. “The tent guy!” The whole crowd cheered, and I laughed and lifted my own glass, and Karen kissed my cheek while the band struck up In Heaven There Is No Beer.
