I looked at Dr. Ames over my reading glasses and told her that it was the fourth of November, a Tuesday, in the year of our Lord 2025, and that the President was a man I had not voted for and would be glad to discuss at length. “Doctor, I also know that a cat has four legs and a Bernhardt dresser has six drawers,” I said. “Ask me anything you like. But ask it with my lawyer in the room.” Kenny made a small sound in his throat. Hal Wallace, who has known me since he was a teller, turned his face away so I would not see him smile.
Dr. Ames closed her folder. She was young, with tired eyes, and I could tell she had been told a different story in the car. “Mr. Coffey, your son said you had been giving away money and wandering at night,” she said. “You do not seem confused to me.” I said I walked at night because my knees ached and the porch swing was the only cure. Then I asked Hal to open box 114. “Starla has been telling everyone I have bearer bonds in there,” I said. “Let us all go look. I would like the deputy to come, too, since he is already here.”
The deputy was a lanky young man with red hair and a nametag that said Teague. He took off his hat in the lobby. “Mr. Coffey, I am Sam, Peggy boy from the gas station,” he said. “Mama told me to keep an eye out this morning. She does not say much but she hears everything over that biscuit counter.” I could have hugged him. Instead I told him that a man who keeps his mother biscuits in his heart makes a good deputy. We walked down to the vault together, the whole sorry procession, Starla last, clutching her purse.
A doctor with a clipboard, a vault with a rusty drawer, and an old furniture maker who had one more surprise than anyone thought.
Hal slid the long steel drawer out of the wall and set it on the table. I unlocked it with my little key. Everyone leaned in. Starla went up on her toes. Inside lay a man gold pocket watch with a cracked crystal, a bundle of envelopes tied with kitchen twine, and nothing else. No bonds. No stock. Not a dime. I picked up the watch and turned it over. On the back, scratched with a nail, were the words To Arlis from his daddy, 1952. I had carried that watch in my head for forty years and never once had the heart to wind it.
“The bonds are gone, Starla,” I said gently. “I cashed every one of them in the spring of 1982, to buy the lot on Morganton Boulevard where my shop still stands. My daddy bought them to give me a start, and I used them as he meant. I did not tell Kenny because I did not want him to grow up thinking his daddy had a pile of money in a box.” I untied the twine. “These are Lorene letters. She wrote me one every anniversary. I read them once a year, on the fourteenth of June. That is all the treasure in box 114.”
Starla made a sound like a kettle. Her face went from pink to gray in three seconds. She had made her plans for a year on the strength of a few words muttered in a recliner, and the plans were worth a pocket watch and some love letters. Deputy Teague stepped forward very politely and asked to see her folder. She would not hand it over. He took it anyway, one page at a time, reading with his lips moving. On page twelve was my signature, perfectly copied. “Sir, did Mr. Coffey sign this?” he asked. Starla said he did, and I said I most certainly did not.
It was Kenny who broke. He sank onto the bench in the vault with his hands over his face and told it in a rush, with the deputy standing over him. He owed seventy thousand dollars to a man in Hickory, from a truck dealership he bought in 2022 and lost. Starla had said all they needed was Paw signature on a trust, that I would never miss the money. “Daddy, I did not think it through,” he said. “I did not want to think.” I sat down beside him on the cold bench and put my hand on the back of his neck, as I did when he was a boy.
Sam Teague charged Starla with forgery and attempted fraud on an elderly person, and the judge in Lenoir, who knew me from the church, set a hearing for December. Kenny pleaded to a lesser charge and promised to testify. I did not file a complaint against my son. I called Hal the next morning and canceled the trust and drew up a new will, the plainest one I could. Then I called Kenny and told him to be at my shop by seven the following Monday morning, in work boots, with a lunch pail.
He came. He stood in my door in the gray light, fifty five years old and smelling of cigarettes, with his eyes down. I handed him a drawknife and a hickory spindle. For the first month he ruined every piece. His hands knew nothing. I never raised my voice. I told him that a rocker is only a chair that has learned patience, and that nobody learns it in a day. By Christmas he had made a pair of arms that were nearly square. By spring he had made a whole chair, and he put it on my porch and sat in it, grinning like a boy.
Every morning at 6:30 I still stop at the gas station on Highway 70. Peggy was waiting at the counter, flour to her elbows, and she wrapped my sausage biscuit in foil with a little extra pepper gravy, the way she knows I like. “Mornin, Mr. Coffey,” she said. “Sausage and black?” I laid down my three dollars and ten cents and a folded bill besides, for Sam. I looked her in the eye and I said it the way I have said it every day since 1979. “If the Lord is willin, Peg.”
