I did not open that envelope in front of my son, just as my granddaughter had begged me, and I am grateful to this day that I listened. Aaliyah drove me home that night with the heater on high and the radio off. At the kitchen table, under the yellow light, I opened the papers one page at a time. The bank statement said what Keyona had said it would say. Two hundred thousand dollars, borrowed in my name, secured by the house on Main Street where I raised Reginald. My signature was at the bottom. It was not mine, but it was close enough to fool a stranger.
Early the next morning I put on my gray suit and my good hat, and Aaliyah took me to the bank. The president, a tall woman named Mrs. Odom, met us in her office and sat very still while I told her the whole story. She asked me to sign a statement, and I did, in my own hand, with my own pen. Then she opened a drawer and said, quietly, “Mr. Batts, I have been waiting for someone to come in.” The loan officer who had approved it had been placed on leave on Monday, because Keyona had told her supervisor about the strange paperwork. The bank was already on my side.
That Sunday I went to church in my regular suit, and I sat in the back pew, the same one they had given me. Reginald stood at the front in his deacon robe, holding the offering plate, and he glanced at me with the careful look of a man who is not sure what I know. After the benediction, I walked up the aisle slowly, with my cane tapping each board. In front of the whole congregation, I handed him the folded statement from the bank. “Son, I would like a word at the shop,” I said. “Alone. Bring your wife.” His face went gray.
A pink hair dryer left beside a bank statement gave one grandfather the weekend to bring his son back to the front pew in Pine Bluff.
The beauty shop of my late wife was dark and quiet that afternoon, the six chairs standing like old friends in a row. I sat in the chair of Delphia, the one by the window, and I had Reginald and Sharonda sit across from me on the waiting bench. I laid the statement on the counter. “Two hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “Using my name and my house.” Sharonda put her face in her hands. “Daddy, I did not know about the loan,” she said. “Please believe me. I knew about the checks from the shop. I did not know about this.” Reginald stared at the floor.
Reginald told me everything. He had put the money into a restaurant with a church friend, a barbecue place on the highway, and the friend had vanished with half of it. He had borrowed more to cover the loss, and more again, until the whole thing was a hole he could not climb out of. “Daddy, I was going to pay it back before you found out,” he said. “I was ashamed of how I got there.” I listened to every word. Then I said, “Son, you were not ashamed of lying to me. You were only ashamed of getting caught. Those are two very different things.”
I gave my terms in the empty shop, with the sun lying across the black and white floor. The loan would be voided as a fraud, and the bank had already agreed. Reginald would resign as deacon, not because I said so, but because a man who forges his father cannot hand out the offering. He would repay the fifty thousand, four hundred dollars from the shop over four years, with interest. And on the first Sunday of next month, I would sit in the front pew with my granddaughter on one side and my daughter in law on the other, where Delphia had always sat.
Reginald resigned from the diaconate on a Wednesday night, standing before the church board with his hands shaking. He did not make an excuse. He told them he had stolen from his father, and he told them he was sorry. Nobody clapped. Afterward, an old man named Brother Lyles put an arm around his shoulder and told him that the road back was long and it was paved with small apologies. The next Sunday, I walked up the center aisle on my cane, in my best hat, and I took the front pew. It was like walking into a room I had left for years.
On the Tuesday after, Keyona came to my door with a casserole and a nervous smile. She is a small young woman with tired eyes, and she had risked her job to tell my granddaughter about the loan. I took her hands in both of mine. “Young lady, you did the hard right thing,” I said. “Most people would have kept quiet and kept their paycheck.” She looked at the floor and said that she had been taught that a bank is not a church, but it ought to have a conscience. I told her the bank president had already offered her a promotion, and she cried into my casserole dish.
In the name of Delphia, who passed four years ago and who fixed hair on Martin Luther King Drive for thirty eight years, I started the Delphia Chair Fund. It pays for cosmetology school tuition, licensing fees and a first set of tools for young women in Jefferson County who want to open a chair of their own. In the first year, we put eleven girls through the program. One of them, nineteen, with a broken tooth and a bright scarf, hugged me hard and said, “Mr. Batts, I am going to sit in her chair someday.” I told her it was waiting.
In June, Aaliyah finished her nursing program with honors, and on the day of the pinning ceremony I sat in the front row of the auditorium in my gray suit. When they called her name, she walked across the stage in white, and she looked right at me and touched the little pin on her collar. Reginald sat next to me, in his plain church suit, and he was weeping without a sound. I reached over and took his hand. We watched my granddaughter together, and neither of us said a word, which was exactly right.