The certificates were printed in the name of Ava because Bryce needed a young, clean, sweet name on the paper, and the reason was in a drawer of the old Heidelberg that Lonnie Ridley had not yet opened. I drove to West Cary Street that morning in my gray overcoat and stood in my old shop, which now smelled of someone else coffee. Lonnie showed me the waste sheets, the plate and a small brown envelope stuck behind the ink fountain. In the envelope was a one page term sheet from a private lender in Glen Allen called Tidewater Capital. It offered four hundred thousand dollars at eighteen percent against the equity of Vaughan Printing, held by Ava Lynn Garrison.
It was simple, and it was ugly. Bryce had told Tidewater that his daughter would inherit the company at her wedding, and that she was willing to pledge her future shares to cover the cost of the day. Ava had not been told. The lender wanted proof, so Bryce hired a man he met at a Kiwanis breakfast to run a night job on the old press, using the code he had found in a box of the papers of Gwendolyn in our attic, and to print stock that looked old enough to be real. The only part that was true was my signature, which they traced from a church bulletin proof.
I sat down on a stool by the folding machine. Lonnie, who has known me since I was a young man with a mustache, put a cup of coffee in my hand and did not say one word. Then I took out my phone and called my granddaughter. She answered on the second ring, from her dorm room at Virginia Commonwealth, and when I told her what I had found, she was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Grandpa, I never signed anything. But Dad asked for my Social Security number last month. He said it was for a wedding discount.” Her voice shook. Mine did not.
A stock certificate gave one son in law the length of a Sunday supper to bring his father in law back to the truth in Richmond.
I gave my terms to Bryce and Felicia at the long table in Short Pump on Sunday evening, with Ava seated at the end holding the hand of her fiance, a quiet young engineer named Colby. I laid the term sheet, a stack of waste sheets and one clean certificate on the tablecloth. I told Bryce he would withdraw the application at Tidewater by nine on Monday, pay the fee out of his own pocket and return every printed sheet to Lonnie Ridley. I said Ava would have the wedding she wanted, on paper stock I would print myself, and Bryce would pay for nothing but his own tuxedo.
Bryce did not shout. That surprised me. He rubbed his face with both hands and said that the car lease, the house and the Range Rover were all months behind, and that his company had cut his territory in half in August. He said he had been sure I was a poor old man with a copy shop, and that when he heard through a friend at a title company that Vaughan Printing had a building worth millions, he had panicked. Felicia was staring at him as if he were a stranger. She said very softly, “You printed the name of my father on a lie.”
Bryce shoved back his chair, snatched the clean certificate off the tablecloth, meaning to run it to the shredder in his home office, and bolted out the side door with the paper flapping in his hand like a flag. Felicia screamed. Colby started to stand, but I raised two fingers. I had asked Lonnie Ridley to bring a delivery of paper by the house before dinner, and I do not know why. A good printer always knows where the paper will stick, and that is the oldest rule of the trade.
Bryce ran out the side door into the driveway, where Lonnie was unloading a pallet of cream wedding stock from a flatbed truck, and he ran straight into the forks of the forklift. The top ream slid and a hundred sheets fluttered down around him like a wedding in snow. He sat in the middle of it, blinking, with the certificate stuck to his shoe. Lonnie climbed down, dusted his hands and said, “Evening, Mr. Bryce. Your paper is here.” The neighbors, who had come out to see what the noise was, applauded politely, the way people do at a recital.
Tidewater Capital received the withdrawal letter at nine on Monday, along with a letter from my lawyer on East Main Street. Bryce paid the fee, returned the certificates and signed a paper saying he had no claim on Vaughan Printing or its sale. Ava froze her credit at the dorm, with Felicia holding the pen. Felicia moved into a smaller house for a year, and then back. Bryce went to a counseling group at the church, which he does not enjoy. The invitations went out on cream cotton paper on the old letterpress of Gwendolyn in April, and they were the straightest anyone in Richmond had ever seen.
In the name of Gwendolyn, who passed in 2021, I started the Gwendolyn Vaughan Comma Fund. It pays for credit freezes, identity monitoring and a plain, honest proofreader for older people and young adults whose names were used on papers they never saw, in Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield counties. In the first year we helped twenty two people, and the first was a college freshman from Petersburg named Deja, whose uncle had opened two cards in her name. She sat at the lunch counter on Cary Street with me and a ham biscuit, shaking, and asked how I stayed calm. I told her my wife taught me. Read it twice, then read it aloud.
On the Saturday of the wedding in May, I stood at the back of a small garden in Church Hill, wearing my good gray suit with a card in my wallet that says “Thank you, Gwen.” Ava came down the path on the arm of her mother, not her father, and when she saw me, she lifted her bouquet in a little salute. Bryce sat in the third row. He had asked. I had said yes. After the vows, Felicia took my hand and said, “Daddy, you were right about the lunch counter.” I said, “Your mother was right about the comma.” We laughed until the photographer asked us to look up.
