Vanessa read the third page with her lips slightly parted, and I watched her hand go to her mouth. It was a stiff, cream colored page with a tire company logo at the top, a logo so well known in Alabama that you could find it on the side of every tow truck between here and Birmingham. “Thad Tire and Service,” she read. “Purchase price, eight million, eight hundred thousand dollars.” She laid the page on the table and slid it across to her husband with the tips of two fingers. “Marcus. Your father sold the tire shops. All seven. In August.” Marcus did not look down. He had been looking at the church fan on the table for several seconds, and his face was the color of the pound cake.
“Daddy,” he said at last. His voice was a rasp. “Daddy, you should have told me.” “I wanted to,” I said. “I wanted to take you and Vanessa to the beach for a week, and put a check in your hand, and see you laugh.” I folded my hands. “Then a letter came from the county. And I thought: let me watch what my son does first. Let me see whether he comes to my door with a pound cake because he loves his old man, or because he needs one more signature.” Vanessa turned and looked at her husband, and I saw in her eyes that she was finally seeing something she had for a long time declined to see.
He tried. I will give him that. He stood and spread his hands and said that it was all a misunderstanding, that the county had made a mistake, that he had paid the taxes himself both years and the clerk must have lost the record. I let him go on. When he ran out of words, I took a second sheet from the brown envelope, a printout of the receipts of the tax collector, and I read the line aloud. “Parcel 18 04 21 0 001. No payments received. Balance due, five thousand, eight hundred dollars.” I laid down the pen. “Marcus, I did not bring you up to lie. I brought you up with a belt and a Bible. I do not know which of the two failed.”
A paper church fan lay on a Sunday table beside a county tax notice and gave one tire man the afternoon to bring his son back to the porch.
His shoulders went. All at once, like a tent when the pole is pulled. He sat back down in his chair and put his face in his hands and sobbed, a big man of fifty with a good suit and a gold watch, and he said that the money had gone into a rental property on Lake Guntersville, a cabin, that he had meant to flip.
The market had turned. The buyer had backed out. He had been paying the mortgage on it with every dollar he could find, including the dollars I handed him each January for the county. “I was going to catch up,” he said. “I was always going to catch up.” Vanessa pressed a napkin to her mouth.
I looked at him a long time. I thought about the Saturday morning in 1981 when he had lost a tooth, and I had found him in the bathroom, six years old, holding it up to the light as if it were a diamond. I thought of the years since. “Marcus,” I said. “I will tell you what I am going to do. I will pay the county, today, the whole five thousand, eight hundred and the penalties, from my own account. The house stays mine. The listing agreement,” and I picked it up from beside the pound cake, “will go into the stove.” Vanessa flinched. “I will light the stove myself,” I said, “if you like.”
She did not answer. She looked like a woman who had wandered into a church in the middle of the sermon and found she knew the hymn. I went on. “Vanessa. You are a real estate agent. You know what a listing agreement does. It gives the broker the right to sell the property of a man whose son has told her he is not competent. I believe,” and I said it as gently as I could, “that you did not know the whole story. But I think you have been told things about me for a long time. Things that were not true. And I think you ought to ask who told you.”
Vanessa turned, slowly, to her husband. “You said he was forgetting things,” she said. “You said he left the stove on.” Marcus nodded. He could not even look up. “I did not know,” she said, and her voice trembled with fury. “I would never have drawn up that listing. I have my license. I have a good name in this town.” Then she did something I will remember until I die. She picked up the listing agreement and tore it in half, and in half again, and put the pieces into the empty bowl where the pound cake had been. “Mr. Thad,” she said, “I apologize. Whatever else happens, I am sorry for this.”
Marcus came to my house the next morning, alone, in his work shirt. He stood in the yard with his hands in his pockets, and I stood on the porch in my robe. Behind me, the old house smelled of coffee and dust and the apple pie that Josephine used to bake. “Daddy,” he said, “I will sell the cabin. And I will pay you back, every cent of the five thousand eight hundred, and the two thousand nine hundred twice. I do not know how long it will take.” “I do not mind how long,” I said. “I only mind that you came.” And he came up the porch steps and put his arms around me, and he smelled like his mother.
In December, the county mailed me a receipt, stamped paid, and I framed it, because a man my age needs a few small victories. Marcus sold the cabin in March. He and Vanessa started coming to Sunday dinner again, with a pound cake, and this time it was homemade. I keep the fan of Josephine on the table by the window, in the same place, the one with Jesus on one side and the bank on the other. When Marcus sits at the table, he looks at it for a long time. Last Sunday he picked it up and fanned himself in the heat, and said, softly, “Daddy, I think Mama would be proud of us.” I said I thought so too.
