I lifted the old tackle box onto the table and unlatched the two brass catches. The lid rose with a groan. Inside, where my son Ron had expected hooks and bobbers, lay a small black recorder, a thick manila envelope, and a framed photograph wrapped in a bath towel. “Dad,” Ron said, “you brought a tape recorder to Sunday chili?” “I brought the truth,” I said. I pressed the button, and out of the little speaker came the voice of my grandson, perfectly clear. “Grandpa will never know. He does not even have a computer. By Christmas I will have forty thousand dollars out of that loan.” There was a pause. Then Tanner laughed, on the tape, and said, “Old people are so easy.”
The kitchen went absolutely still. My daughter Linda put down her spoon. Emily sat with her hand pressed to her mouth. And Tanner, in his new Jordans, stood at the end of the table with his face the color of paste. “Where did you get that?” he said hoarsely. “I got it the way I got my first billboard lease,” I said. “By paying attention. A man at the bank told me last week that a young person had called about my accounts, and I thought, I am eighty years old, but I have not forgotten how to leave a recorder running.” I pushed the second button. the voice of Tanner himself came out again, this time telling Aunt Linda about Ghana.
He lunged for the box. Ron stood up so fast that he knocked over his bowl of chili, and caught his nephew by the arm. “Sit down, Tanner,” he said. It was not a shout. It was the voice of a man who has been a high school football coach for thirty years. Tanner sat. I took the manila envelope from the box and laid it on the table. “This is the closing statement for my billboard leases,” I said. “A hundred and forty boards, from Joplin to Rolla, sold to Midland Outdoor for six million, eight hundred thousand dollars. I signed it on the ninth of October. The only reason you did not know is that I did not tell you.”
An old tackle box opened at a chili supper held a recorder that showed a grandson what he had really said.
Tanner sat with his head down. For a long minute he did not say a word, and when he did speak, his voice was cracked and young. “Grandpa, I owed money. I owed it to people who scare me. There was a bar, and a game, and then a lot of other games, and it just kept growing. I did not mean to take Social Security. I only meant to borrow it.” “And the wedding money of Emily?” I asked. He flinched. “I was going to put it back. I swear.” Emily was crying silently now, big tears sliding down her cheeks. “Tanner,” she said, “I would have given you the money if you had asked. That is what I cannot get over. I would have given it to you.”
I looked at the boy. I have loved him since he was born, a blond, round cheeked baby with a loud voice, and I have never learned to stop.
“Here is what is going to happen,” I said. “I called the sheriff yesterday. A deputy is going to take your statement tomorrow at nine, and you are going to give it truthfully. The loan application is cancelled. The debit card is destroyed. And you are going to live somewhere that is not my house.” He lifted his eyes. “Where?” “There is a program in Joplin,” I said, “for young men with a gambling problem. It lasts ninety days. I have paid the deposit. You can go, or you can wait for the deputy. It is up to you.”
Tanner chose the program. He went on Tuesday, in the truck of Ron, with a duffel bag and the same new shoes. I will not say it was easy. He called every night for the first two weeks and begged to come home, and Linda, who had cried through the first three calls, finally told him in a firm voice that she would pick up on Sunday and not before. He stopped calling. On the thirty first day, he wrote me a letter. It was short. It said he had learned the name of his habit, and that he had lied to me so often that he no longer knew what his own voice sounded like. It ended, I am trying to find out.
I repaid Emily, Linda, and Ron their twelve thousand dollars at the next family dinner, in three white envelopes, and I added a little more for the trouble. Emily refused hers, but I insisted, and she finally took it with a laugh and put it toward the cake. In June she married a quiet young man named Josh, an elementary school teacher with an enormous beard. The wedding was held in a field outside Ozark, under an oak tree, with folding chairs and wildflowers. I paid for all of it, and she knows it, and she has never mentioned it again.
On the morning of the wedding, my driver took me down I 44 to look at something. There, on the last billboard I still owned, a forty foot board near Strafford that I had kept out of the sale, was a new message in bold white letters on a blue background. CONGRATULATIONS EMILY AND JOSH. LOVE, GRANDPA. I got out of the car and stood on the shoulder, with the trucks roaring past, and read it three times. Then I laughed out loud. An old man in a suit on the side of the highway, laughing at his own sign. I suppose that is what an advertising man is for.
Tanner came home in the fall, ninety days clean. He works at a lumberyard in Springfield, and on Sundays he drives out to see me, and he asks if I want company. I say yes. We sit on the porch and watch the traffic go by on the highway, and sometimes he tells me about his meetings, and sometimes he does not. Last week he brought a thermos of coffee and a box of fishing lures, and he said, very shyly, that he had been thinking he might like to learn. I looked at the old tackle box beside my chair. I told him I knew a place.