The man in the waiting room of Gloria was seventy six, in a brown jacket from another decade, with a cap held in both hands and a paper bag at his feet. He stood when I came in. I had not seen that face in forty seven years, and I knew it at once, the same crooked eyebrow, the same chin. “Earline,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse. “I am Curtis Dalton. I do not expect you to want to talk to me.” I looked at the man who had left a three year old and a girl of thirty in a rented flat. “Sit down, Curtis,” I said. “Gloria tells me you have something to say.”
He told it with his cap turning in his hands. In the spring, a woman named Shelby had found him through a family history website, and called him in Knoxville, and bought him a bus ticket to Chattanooga. She was kind. She told him his son wanted to see him. She took him to dinner and paid for his motel. And then, at the third dinner, she slid an affidavit across the table. It said that in 1985 Earline Fox had promised him, in his presence, to leave the cleaners to Danny. There was a line for his signature. Twenty thousand dollars was waiting at the bottom. “I signed nothing,” Curtis said. “I came here instead.”
Gloria laid the stock transfer on the desk beside him, with the notary stamp, and the false signature, and the name of the sister of Shelby. Curtis looked at it for a long time. “Earline, I am not a good man,” he said. “I know that. I left when the boy was three, and I have thought about it every day since. But I will not stand in a room and swear to a lie against you for twenty thousand dollars.” He raised his eyes, brimming. “I sat on a bus for four hours deciding whether I could be your sons father again. And I decided I could not, unless I told the truth first.”
A father returned after forty seven years gave one mother the morning to bring her son back to the cleaners in Chattanooga.
We made our plan around the desk of Gloria, in terms as clean as a pressed shirt. She would file that morning in chancery court to void the transfer, and report the notary to the secretary of state. Curtis would give a sworn statement. And I would do the one thing I had not done since the dinner. I would telephone my son. “Danny, it is your mother,” I said, when he picked up. “I want you to come to the office of Gloria Henley on Market Street. Right now. And bring your wife, if she will come.” A pause. “Mom, I am in a meeting,” he said. “Danny,” I said. “Now.”
They arrived in forty minutes, Danny in a rumpled shirt with his tie askew and Shelby in a white pantsuit with a leather folder, smiling her smooth smile. Danny saw the old man in the chair before he saw anyone else. He stopped short in the doorway with his mouth open. “Who is this?” he asked, though I think he knew. Curtis stood, with his cap in front of him like a shield. “Son, I am your father,” he said. “And I did not come here to ask you for anything. I came to tell you that your wife offered me twenty thousand dollars to lie about your mother.”
Shelby moved first. Quick as a cat, she snatched the stock transfer from the desk of Gloria and bolted for the door, with the paper crumpled in her hand, to rip it up in the elevator. But Gloria is a woman who has defended a lot of widows, and she had asked her paralegal to wait in the hall. Ernesto, a quiet man built like a refrigerator, stepped into the doorway without a word and stood there, his arms folded. Shelby bounced off him. She stood in the hall with her mouth open and her white pantsuit rumpled. Ernesto politely held out his hand, and she gave him the paper.
Danny stood in the middle of the carpet while it all came apart in front of him. He looked at his father, then at the transfer, then at the woman he had married two years ago. “Shelby, did you forge the signature of my mother?” he asked. She did not answer. “Did you tell me she was going to put me out?” Nothing. He turned slowly and looked at me, and his face crumpled like a boy of three. “Mom, I stood up at that dinner,” he whispered. “I said those things. I do not know why. I think I stopped being able to think.” I took him in my arms, a big man of fifty, and held on.
The money consequences were stern. The court voided the transfer within the week. The secretary of state revoked the commission of the notary, who was the sister of Shelby, and the district attorney opened a file on both women for forgery and attempted fraud. Danny filed for a divorce, and signed over his claim to the house they had bought on credit. I took back the Silverado, and I did not give it to him. Instead, I gave Danny a job, behind the counter at the Brainerd store, folding shirts for fifteen dollars an hour, which was the pay I had made in 1985.
In the name of my own mother, Opal Mae Turner, who passed in 1998 and who ironed shirts for the wealthy of Lookout Mountain to feed me, I started the Pressed Shirt Fund. It pays for legal help, business audits and counseling for older owners of small businesses in Hamilton, Bradley and Walker counties who are being pushed aside by their own families. In the first year, we helped thirty six owners. A woman of eighty, with flour on her apron, sat in the office and said, “My son says I am confused.” I said, “Show me your books.”
In April, I stopped by the Brainerd store at eight in the morning with two cups of coffee. Danny stood behind the counter in a green apron, with his name stitched on it, ringing up a woman with a basket of dress shirts. He did it well. He smiled, without effort, and said, “Have a good one, Madam.” When the line cleared, I handed him a cup. Behind him, in the window, an old man in a brown jacket sat on a stool with a paper bag in his lap, a little shy. He had come every morning for a week. Danny looked at him, and then at me, and he set the coffee down. “Dad,” he said. “Come around the counter.”
