“Todd, move,” I said, and the room went quiet. I am eighty years old and I have never in my life been a man to raise his voice at a son. But there is a tone a professor uses with a first year student who has dropped a beaker, and I used it. Todd stepped away from the door, as if a hand had pushed him. I put on my coat, buttoned it, and nodded to Andrea, who was staring at her screen. “Young lady, I am going home to see my garage,” I said. “If you would like to come along and ask your questions, you may. But you will have to keep up.”
The whole taproom came with me. I did not ask them to. Kayla pulled off her apron and tossed it on the bar. Four retired men from the Wednesday crowd, a young couple with a golden retriever, a woman in a Colorado State sweatshirt, they all fell in behind us down Linden Street like a parade. It was six blocks to Mathews Street, in the dusk. Todd walked ahead, red faced, making calls on his phone, and Andrea hurried at my elbow, saying nothing. By the time we reached my yellow bungalow, there were fourteen people on the sidewalk.
A white moving truck was backed up to my garage, with the ramp down. Brooke, in a puffy vest, stood in the driveway with a clipboard, directing two men in gray coveralls. The tarp was off. There under the work light sat Ingrid other wife, a 1953 Chevrolet Corvette in Polo White with a red interior, serial number 214, one of the first three hundred built. I had bought her from a widow in Greeley in 1971, for four thousand dollars, and put in fifty years of Sundays. Harold from across the alley stood on his porch in his bathrobe, holding up a cell phone like a torch.
A bartender kept a cribbage board hidden, a 1953 Corvette stayed in its garage, and a son learned to count to fifteen two.
“Brooke,” I said. She spun around and the clipboard slid out of her fingers. “That car is a collector item worth over a million dollars,” I said, not loudly. “My son has never seen it, so I assume you did not ask him either.” Todd, who had come up behind me, said, “Dad, what?” in a voice I will never forget, as though a trapdoor had opened under his feet. Brooke stammered that she had only found the paperwork in the sewing table drawer, and that she thought it was a rotting wreck, and that her buyer had promised sixty thousand.
Andrea cleared her throat, then, and I turned to her. She held the tablet against her chest like a hymnal. “Mr. Lindqvist, I need to tell you that I have no intention of admitting you to Silverleaf,” she said, firmly. “The check is a forgery. I compared it to the signature on your voter registration. And I do not believe you have any cognitive impairment whatsoever.” She looked at Todd. “Mr. Lindqvist, I have been doing intake for twenty years. I know what a man who needs help looks like. That is not what I see here.” There was a murmur from the sidewalk.
Kayla had, in the meantime, called the Fort Collins police, and two officers pulled up behind the moving truck with their lights off. The movers, wisely, set down the dolly and put their hands in their pockets. It was not a loud scene. Nobody shouted. The older officer asked me very politely whether I wished to make a statement, and I said that I did, and that I would like Harold to hold my elbow while I did. Harold came down off his porch in his slippers and did exactly that. The officers took Brooke aside, and Todd sat down on the curb with his head in his hands.
I sat beside him, which took me a little while. The sidewalk was cold. “Dad, I owe two hundred and sixty thousand dollars,” he said, in the dark. “The warranty company has been laying people off, and I covered a hole with the company card, and Brooke said we should get you into a facility and sell the house and you would never miss any of it. And then we found out about the car.” He laughed, bitterly. “I did not even know what was in my own father garage.” I put my arm around him. “Todd, you did not ask,” I said. “That is all.”
Brooke was charged with forgery and attempted theft. Todd was charged with conspiracy, and pleaded to a reduced count, with probation and a repayment plan he must keep for six years. I did not sell the Corvette to pay his debt. Instead I sold it to the Rocky Mountain Auto Museum in Denver, on a handshake, for one million four hundred thousand dollars, with a condition. They would display it with a plaque, and an annual scholarship in Ingrid name for a student at Colorado State in agricultural engineering. The first winner was a girl from Sterling. Another, the next year, was a bartender from Fort Collins named Kayla.
Todd came to the taproom on a Thursday in March. He stood inside the door, awkward, in a plain brown coat, and I waved him over. Kayla slid a glass of amber across the bar, and the deck of cards, and a worn board. “Your crib, Todd,” she said, with a straight face. I taught him the basic count. Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is two. He was terrible. He pegged out of turn, he miscounted a run, and he laughed, a real laugh I had not heard since he was twelve.
On the last Thursday of April, I beat him by two holes. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the board with a puzzled smile. “Dad, did Mom ever let you win?” he asked. I thought about it. “Not once in fifty four years,” I said. Then I turned over my last card and looked at the crib. Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and a double run of three. It was a twenty four hand, and Kayla, behind the bar, polished a glass and said, in a voice that carried across the taproom, “Gene, that was the best hand I have ever seen.”
