The name on the co signer line was Lorraine Beasley. “Do you know her?” Mr. Abernathy asked. “I have never met her in my life,” I said, and it was the truth. “But she has written to me every Christmas for forty five years.” I told him about the cards that arrived each December in a blue envelope, how Patricia would take the mail from the box before I got to it, how once I saw her burn one in the sink and she said it was only a church fundraiser. Mr. Abernathy looked at the clock. It was 11:20. “Mr. Truluck, I called Sergeant Dana Pickens of the Greenville police. She is in the next room. They will be here in forty minutes. What would you like to do?”
“I want to hear it from them,” I said. “Both of them.” Sergeant Pickens came in, a calm woman about fifty, and asked me to stay in the back office with the blinds drawn. At noon sharp the front door chimed. I heard my son voice, light and cheerful, the voice he uses when he wants something. “Mr. Abernathy, we are here for the Lariat.” Then a woman voice, soft and a little nervous. “Chad, are you sure your father knows about all this? He said it was a surprise.” I opened the office door and stepped out. Chad turned around with a key fob in his hand, and every ounce of color left his face.
“Dad, what are you doing here?” “I might ask you the same, son.” The woman beside him was sixty six, silver bob, neat gray suit, a face I somehow knew. She looked at me and put her hand over her mouth. “Harmon?” she said. “Harmon Truluck? I thought you were at the church picnic. Chad told me it was your idea.” Mr. Abernathy set the file on the glass counter. “Miss, the buyer on this application is Harmon Truluck. This gentleman is not him.” She read her own signature next to my name, and then she turned to Chad slowly. “You said your father was too proud to ask for help,” she said. “You said he wanted this truck so he could drive to the Bible study without the Ranger breaking down.”
Harmon Truluck learned his son had used a hidden birth mother to co sign a fake truck loan, and chose treatment over prison for the boy.
Chad sat down on a leather chair in the showroom, and the whole story came out in pieces. Three weeks ago he went looking for my checkbook in the cedar chest at the foot of Patricia bed. Under her old quilts he found a shoe box with forty five blue envelopes, every one opened, every one signed With love, always. Inside each was a school picture of a child he never knew, and a short letter asking only whether Chad was well. “Dad, I am not yours,” he whispered. “Mama never told me. I wrote to her on the address inside the cards.” I sat down across from him. My hands were shaking worse than his. “You are mine,” I said. “You were mine the night they put you in Patricia arms.”
Lorraine told the rest in a steady voice. In the winter of 1978 she was a seventeen year old girl in Spartanburg with a baby and no family left to speak of. Patricia, her cousin, who had lost three babies of her own, begged to take him. The only condition was that Lorraine would never come near, so the boy would have one mother. Lorraine agreed, and she kept her word for forty five years. She became a surgical nurse and then owned two dialysis clinics in Anderson. Every Christmas she mailed a card, because she could not stop. “Chad called me in September,” she said. “I would have given him anything. I did not ask what the truck was for. I should have.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Out on the lot, a salesman was washing a white truck that would never be ours, and the water ran bright in the noon sun.
Sergeant Pickens cleared her throat. “Mr. Truluck, it is fraud and identity theft. It is a felony, and I need to know whether you want to press it.” I looked at my son, forty eight years old, gaunt, sweating through his good shirt. He had taken the checkbook. He had sat at this dealership with my driver license and signed my name. And he had also made me coffee every morning for two years. “Dana,” I said, “I want him in a treatment bed by tonight, not a cell. If he finishes ninety days and tells the whole truth to a judge, I will sign whatever it takes.” Chad covered his face. “Dad, I have been using again since June.”
“I know,” I said. “I wrote it down. Every time you were out past two. I just did not want to be right.” Lorraine knelt in front of him with both hands on his knees. “Palmetto Hope House in Greenville has a bed opening at four o clock,” she said. “I called them from the car this morning, because I had a feeling about the way you talked about money. I will pay for the full ninety days, Chad. Eighteen thousand dollars. Not for your father. Not for the truck. For me, because I waited forty five years to be allowed to do one thing for you.” Mr. Abernathy tore the application in half and fed both halves into the shredder, and he did not charge us a penny for the trouble.
Chad checked in at four. Lorraine and I drove behind the van in my Ranger, since she did not want to go alone, and neither did I. On the way back we stopped at the Waffle House on Augusta Road, and I told her about Patricia, the good years and the hard ones. She told me about her grandson who plays trombone. I learned she was not the stranger I had feared for so long. She was the woman who gave me the greatest gift of my life, and my wife had been too afraid to say thank you.
Chad finished the ninety days in March, forty nine pounds heavier and clear eyed. Lorraine comes to Sunday dinner now, and last Christmas the two of us read all forty five letters out loud at my kitchen table. I never did buy that F 250. The Ranger still has its cracked windshield, but Chad replaced it himself with his first paycheck from the landscaper in Mauldin who hired him. When the next blue envelope arrived, I did not wait for the mailbox. I met her at the door, and I wrote back, Dear Lorraine, thank you for always.
