Part 3 — Beneath The Rocket Pops
My fingers closed on a bread bag at the bottom of Moms freezer. I carried it to the cab, sat on the driver seat in the dark, and opened it by the glow of my phone. Inside were a brown ledger, a disposable camera, and a legal envelope sealed with tape.
The ledger was in Moms slanted pencil. Most of it recorded thirty-one years of cones given to kids who had no money, with each name and each year. Then, near the back, the pencil changed to ink. July 3, the fuse back in the air conditioner box. July 9, gone again. Tessie, I took photographs.
I phoned Deputy Marcy Hale, who had sat in the back row at the service. I did as Mom asked, and did not go alone. She was at the garage in twenty minutes, in her own truck, and she photographed the ledger, the freezer, and the cut padlock exactly where they lay.
The camera went to the county lab. The prints showed the empty fuse slot, a date written on each back in Moms hand, and a muddy bootprint on the step. It matched the boots Roy had worn to the VFW. He had said he was fetching the car, but the prints told a different story.
In the legal envelope were two documents. The first was a copy of a county deed record. Roy had forged my mothers name on a refinance of our house, sixty-four thousand dollars, and wired the money to an account across the state line. She had found it at the recorders office in June.
The second paper was her will, handwritten, witnessed by Earl and the VFW commander, and notarized in May. She left the house and the truck to me. The remainder went to a fund she named herself, Nobody Is Too Broke For Vanilla, to buy cones for any child who runs up with empty pockets.
Roy was brought in the next morning. He said he had assumed the fuse was a spare. Deputy Hale put the ledger pages, the boot print, and the bank transfer on the table in that order, and he went quiet. Then he asked for a lawyer.
He was charged with forgery, elder financial exploitation, and tampering with a vehicle. The coroner reopened his review at the prosecutors request, and a judge froze the refinance money. Roy had rushed my mothers cremation, but he could not rush a ledger written in pencil and ink.
The bank that issued the loan on a forged signature wrote it off in full and sent me a letter of apology. The court returned the deed to my name, free and clear, before the end of the month.
We held a second service on Sunday, the one she deserved, at the Methodist church. Earl paid for the ham luncheon before anyone could stop him. Two hundred and eleven people came back, and this time the chairs held.
On the first Saturday of June I took the repaired truck down Maple Avenue with the old song playing. Kids came running from every porch. A small boy stood at the window with empty pockets, and I handed him a vanilla cone. Nobody is too broke for that.
