The clerk looked at her screen, then looked straight at me, and told the whole tent whose name was on the second title application filed three weeks ago. It was not Tyler. It was Greg. My own son.
My grandson hauled my truck off to the auction block, but before he ever did, my son had quietly started the paperwork to put it in his own name, which meant both of them were circling the one thing I had left of my own two hands.
Earl had already stopped the sale. The paper from my envelope was the Florida title, owner Walter, never signed over. Son, you cant sell a vehicle you dont hold the title to, Earl said. Tyler claimed he had a bill of sale, I signed it, and Earl laid it next to the real title and said these two dont look like the same hand. Lionel, my old motor-pool buddy, said it louder, Walter signs his W like a fence post, that aint it. The man who bid forty-eight thousand put his paddle down and walked off, and a deputy came over to ask Tyler some questions.
Then the clerk found the second title application, filed three weeks earlier, and it was in Gregs name.
I am Walter, seventy-six. I turned wrenches in an Army motor pool for twenty years, and in 1998 I found a sixty-seven pickup rotting behind a feed store and paid six hundred dollars cash and spent eleven years bringing it back, new floor pans, a rebuilt straight six, turquoise paint my wife picked herself. After a small stroke the doctor took my license for six months, and my grandson Tyler started coming around, and one Saturday the carport was empty.
When I called Greg, he said, Dad, Tylers young, let him have it, its just a truck. I did not argue. But I remembered the brown envelope I had stuck in the kitchen drawer the morning before my stroke, meaning to put it in the safe, and I never had. I opened the drawer and there was my title, never signed, and I put it in my good jackets inside pocket.
A title tells the truth no bill of sale can fake, and the state record still had my name on it, which meant nobody had bought or been given anything. Tylers forged signature was one betrayal. Gregs quiet title application, started weeks before Tyler ever hauled the truck off, was another, and it stung worse, because Greg was the one who kept telling me to let it go.
My son had not been protecting my truck. He had been positioning himself to take it, and when Tyler moved first, Greg let the auction happen rather than warn me, hoping to sort out between the two of them who ended up with the old mans money.
The truck was never theirs to fight over. The title was mine, unsigned, and a forged bill of sale and a title application filed without my signature are not clever moves, they are fraud, and a deputy at a car auction takes that seriously.
Tyler faced the law for the forgery. Greg faced me, which in some ways was worse for him, because there is no deputy for what a father feels when his son turns out to be circling his truck like a buzzard.
Lionel drove me home with the title back in my pocket and the truck back in my name. In six months I will have my license again, and I will start it every Saturday morning the way I always did.
Youre just a rusty old man with a rusty old truck, Tyler told me. The truck was never rusty, I brought it back myself over eleven years, and the only rust in that family turned out to be two men who thought a stroke meant they could help themselves to it. Lionel, who stood with me, is the one I will leave it to. He signs his name honestly, and he never once asked for the keys.