The text on my phone said that my son wondered why I was at Hector, and I read it standing in the waiting room of the garage in Little Rock with a paper cup of coffee going cold in my hand. I am Peggy Dunn, seventy four years old, and I have never in my life been afraid of my own telephone. Hector set the two black boxes on the counter, wrapped in his grease rag, and looked at me with sorrowful brown eyes. “Mrs. Dunn,” he said, “I can leave them right where they were. Or I can call somebody. You decide.” I told him to put them back exactly as he found them.
My son is Randall. He is forty nine years old, a bright and charming boy, a mortgage broker in Conway who has had three businesses fail and a divorce. He had called me every Sunday night for twenty years. For the last two months, he had also been calling on Wednesdays, to ask how I was feeling, whether I was driving much, and whether I had thought about a living trust. I had said that I would think about it. I sat in my Buick in the parking lot of the garage, and I thought about it very carefully.
That evening, I telephoned my lawyer, Mr. Pettigrew, who had settled the asbestos suit for my husband Lewis. He listened for a long time. Then he said that he had been concerned too. Randall had called his office twice, pretending to be me, asking about the account that held the one million, nine hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Pettigrew had given him nothing. He suggested a simple, quiet plan. On Sunday, I would drive my usual route to church, with the trackers still beneath the bumper, and he would be waiting in the parking lot.
A pair of black boxes zip tied beneath a Buick gave one retired widow the length of a church service to bring her son back to the truth in Little Rock.
I gave my terms on the steps of the church after the service, on Sunday morning, in my good blue coat, when my son came across the lot with his hands in his jacket pockets and a worried smile. “Randall, I know about the trackers. I know about the phone calls to Mr. Pettigrew. I do not want you arrested. I want you to tell me why. And I want you to come inside the church hall with me, and the lawyer, and tell the truth, because I raised you to tell it.”
Randall stopped at the bottom of the steps, and the smile fell off his face like paint. “Mom, I owe three hundred and ten thousand dollars to a casino in Tunica,” he said, in a small voice. “They have sent men to my house. I thought if you signed the money into a trust with me as trustee, I could keep them quiet, and nobody would be hurt. I put the trackers on so I would know when you were away from home. I was going to make you sign on a day you were tired.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. “I am so ashamed.”
But shame is sharp, and Randall could not stay. He suddenly spun around, snatched the little black remote from the pocket of his jacket, the one that connected the two trackers, and ran across the church parking lot toward his silver truck, meaning to throw the device into the river. He ran past the bus. Hector, who had come to church that morning in his Sunday suit, stepped out from behind a minivan. Two deacons moved from the left. And Mr. Pettigrew stood at the gate.
Randall stopped at the fence of the parking lot with the remote clutched in his fist and four men standing in front of him in their best suits, the noon bells ringing overhead, the pigeons rising off the steeple in a gray cloud. Hector spoke very softly. “Mr. Randall, your mother has been my customer for nine years. She brings me tamales at Christmas. Give me that, and let us go inside.” Randall stared at the old mechanic. His whole body sagged. He put the remote in the hand of Hector, and he began to cry.
The consequences were quiet and firm. My lawyer arranged a payment plan with the casino, using a small portion of the money, on condition that Randall enter a treatment program for gambling and give up his broker license for two years. The trackers were removed and placed in a drawer, as a reminder. Randall moved into my spare room, and he paid rent. Every Sunday night, as before, he called, though he now called from the next room, and we laughed about that.
In the name of my husband Lewis, who passed in 2021, I started the Lewis Dunn Fund. It pays for legal help for railroad workers and widows hurt by asbestos and for treatment and counseling for families struggling with gambling, in Pulaski, Saline and Faulkner counties. In the first year we helped eighty three families recover compensation and paid for treatment for forty seven people. One was a seventy four year old retired brakeman from North Little Rock who held his settlement letter against his chest and told the lawyer he could finally buy his wife a new porch.
On a bright Sunday in September, I drove my old Buick to church, with my son Randall in the passenger seat, singing along with the radio, off key. Hector had polished the car until it shone. When we parked, Randall opened the door for me and gave me his arm. In the pew, he held the hymnal so I could see. At the close of the service, he turned to me and whispered, “Mom, thank you for not giving up.” I patted his hand, and I told him that was simply what mothers do, every single day of the week.
