Part 3 — Record Number One
The needle lifted, and the lawyers office was so quiet we could hear the dust settle on the credenza.
Dad had said the second page was in the sleeve of a number, and the number was cut off. But I had been carrying one record around since the night in the garage, the one I had saved from the rain with my coat.
I looked at the corner of its sleeve. In faded grease pencil, upper right, was a single digit. A one.
Vince stood up so fast his chair rolled back into the file cabinet. He said I could not just go pulling things out of records.
Lyle, the lawyer, said calmly that any heir could examine the sleeve, and he would be glad to witness it.
I slid out the album. Taped inside the cardboard, folded in three, was a sheet of Dads typing paper, dated November 2.
It was a new will, signed and witnessed by two night-shift engineers from the radio station and notarized by the stations receptionist. It named me executor. It left the house, the records and what remained of the savings to Vince and me in equal halves.
A paragraph at the bottom was addressed to Vince. “Son, you may have taken the money, but you cannot take the name Nate. Pay back the fifty-two thousand dollars out of your own half, and we are square.”
Nate had written that he would rather leave his boys a hard lesson and a whole family than a clean bank account and an empty chair.
Vince sat down slowly. He said he had gambled on the riverboats in Verona, and he had told himself every month that he would put it back.
Lyle explained the law in his plain voice. A New York executor must file an inventory and account to the Surrogates Court, and any heir can ask the judge to remove one who stalls. With the new will, Vince was no longer executor, and the repayment would come off his half.
The Chevy keys, the turntable and the funeral envelope went across the desk in a stack. The envelope was still sealed.
Odessa and I spent a whole weekend with towels and fans in the garage. The sleeves were ruined, but most of the vinyl inside was fine, and volunteers from the public radio station in Syracuse came with a record cleaning machine and a pot of coffee.
Four thousand records came home, all of them but a few hundred.
On a December night, Vince came to the garage with a bag of groceries and asked whether he could sit in Dads chair.
I put on the 45, and we listened to the last line together.
“That is the show, folks. Go home and tell somebody you love them. Nate out.”