I opened the manila envelope, and the first sheet I laid on the table was a copy of the contract from Nashville. Nine point four million dollars for my half of a song I wrote on an upside down bucket behind a television repair shop in the summer of 1984. Kim picked it up and read it twice. Travis took it from her hand and read it a third time. Darlene stopped with a fork halfway to her mouth and a crumb of pound cake stuck to her lip. “Bernie,” Travis said slowly, “you wrote that song? The one about the man at the train station? My father used to play that record in the truck.”
I said yes. I told them about Ronnie, and the bucket, and the first small checks that arrived in the mail with no more fuss than an electric bill. I told them how Ellen had been the only one who knew, and that she had kept the secret for twenty years without a single slip, and that I had kept it for fourteen more after she was gone. Kim had begun to cry soundlessly, her mouth tight, her eyes huge. “Daddy,” she said. “You could have told me.” I looked at her for a long time. “I could have,” I said. “I wanted to find out if I needed to.”
Then I took the last paper from the envelope. It was a letter, on state letterhead, from a woman named Ms. Alvarez at the Office of Inspector General, and it was dated that very morning. It said that, following my telephone report of the previous Saturday, an investigator had reviewed the caregiver file, the monthly payments, and the signature on the enrollment form. It said that the signature did not match mine. And it said that Ms. Alvarez would be arriving at this address at four o clock that afternoon, and that it would be in the best interest of everyone involved to be present.
A screwdriver in a shirt pocket outlasted a forged signature, a state file, and a song nobody knew he wrote.
The ceiling fan clicked. Kim sat motionless with her hands flat on the table. It was Darlene who moved first, pushing back her chair with a screech, her face the color of the pound cake. “Now, Kim,” she said, “you told us it was all legal. You told us the state sent a nurse to check on him.” “Mother,” Travis said, very low, “be quiet.” He had never said that to her in his life. Darlene sat down again, and folded her napkin into a small square, and unfolded it, and folded it again, like a woman trying to hide behind a piece of paper.
At four o clock sharp, a gray sedan pulled into the driveway, and a short, brisk woman in a navy blazer came up the walk carrying a leather case. Ms. Alvarez shook my hand first, then the hand of Kim, and she asked, politely, whether there was a Mr. Collins at home who needed help with bathing. I raised my hand. She gave me a small, tired smile. “I have done this for nineteen years,” she said. “You are the first one who called me yourself.” She sat down at the table, opened the case, and placed a recorder beside the jam.
Kim told the truth. I will say that for her, and I said it to the investigator too. There were no more excuses. She said she had seen a woman at church do it, and it had looked so easy. She said the boat payment was behind, and she had told herself that her father would never find out, and she had told herself that he would never have refused. She said all of it quietly, with her hands in her lap, and when she was finished she looked up at me. “I am so ashamed, Daddy,” she said. “I do not know how I turned into this.”
Ms. Alvarez explained the options with great care. The state would require full repayment, and there would be a hearing. A prosecutor might or might not file charges, depending on cooperation. “Mr. Collins, you are the injured party in a way,” she said. “Your name was used.” I thought about my daughter in the crib, the year she learned to walk on the linoleum of my shop floor. I told Ms. Alvarez that I wanted the state repaid in full that very week, from my own money, so that no taxpayer would be out a dollar over a mistake my daughter made.
Kim would owe the money to me instead, and she would pay it, a little at a time, for as long as it took. She wept at that. I think she had expected to be thrown away, and what she received was a bill. The prosecutor accepted the arrangement along with a year of probation and a program for first offenders. Travis took a second job at a lumber yard. The boat was sold. Darlene came to my house the following week with a plate of cookies, stood on the porch, and said in a quavering voice, “Bernie, I am sorry about the charity case remark.” I told her to come in for coffee.
I did one more thing with the money. Ronnie had a daughter named Tess, a nurse in Louisville whom I had not seen since the funeral of her father. I called her, and I told her the truth, and I sent her half of what I had received, because the song belonged to the two of us on that bucket. She was silent on the phone for a very long time. Then she said, in the exact voice of her father, “Mr. Collins, Daddy always said you were the only honest man in the music business, and you were not even in it.”
Last Sunday, Kim and the grandchildren came out to my little brick house. We sat on the porch while the sun went down, and I took the old guitar out from under the bed, the case with the name of Ronnie scratched across the top. I tuned it slowly. Kim asked what I wanted to play, and I said something slow. About a man waiting at a train station. The little ones sat at my feet, and Kim leaned against the porch rail, and in the last light my daughter sang the second verse with me, softly, all the words correct.
