Part 3 — Grandpas Spare Tire
Static hissed, and then the old trucker was back on the line. He was called Gil, and he had been Grandpas friend on Channel 9 for forty years. He cleared his throat and said, Sawbuck told me you would work it out, son. Think about the van.
I knew the van. A 1987 Dodge, parked behind the shop under a blue tarp since I was twelve. Grandpa used to sit in the driver seat with the door open and listen to the radio, though he never drove it and never let anyone touch the spare.
The lawyer, Mr. Hendricks, put down his pen. He told my father that nobody should leave the building and phoned the county sheriff. A deputy met us at the shop within the hour, and he and I pulled the tarp off together.
In the back of the van, under the floor mat, sat the spare tire well. I lifted the tire out. Beneath it lay a green ammunition box wrapped in an oil cloth, and inside it a stack of folded papers and a cassette tape.
The top paper was Grandpas real will, signed in March of the year before and witnessed by Gil and a neighbor. It left the house, the shop, the land, and the old trucks to me, with the recliner and his watch to my father. He had added one line: Darren may have what is his, and no more than what is honest.
The older papers told another story. Twenty-two years earlier my mother had worked in the office of a grain cooperative, and she altered the books to cover debts my father owed. Grandpa found out. He quietly repaid $48,000 from his savings and made them sign a confession, which he kept.
That was why they left me with him. It had never been work in Nevada. They had run away, ashamed and afraid of the cooperative board, and Grandpa agreed to raise me while they straightened out their lives. He never told them he had written it all down.
The old debt was long past any statute, and he knew it. He kept those pages so that I would learn he had not been abandoned by his son, he had been the one holding the door open.
The forged will was a different matter. A fresh forgery, filed with a lawyer weeks after Grandpa died. Analysts at the state lab matched the signature to my mothers hand using her old co-op ledgers. Mr. Hendricks filed the real will, and the probate court accepted it within the month.
Darren and Shelley were charged with forgery and attempted fraud on the estate. They took a lawyer after two weeks and entered a plea. The judge ordered probation, repayment of every fee, and a written apology to the court.
The day after the hearing my father stood in the doorway of the shop, looking older than I remembered. He said, I should have called, Wes. I should have called every week for three years. I told him the radio is on Channel 9 on Sundays if he wants to talk.
He gets on the air most Sundays now. Gil answers first, and my father listens. The recliner, which he returned the day of the hearing, sits in my front room. Krista curls up in it with a blanket, and the radio hums beside her.
