Two weeks after the tow truck backed into our driveway in Lafayette, the telephone of my brother in law rang in the middle of Sunday dinner at the house of his parents, and he answered it with a mouthful of cornbread. I am Tasha Guidry, thirty three years old, and I was sitting across the table with my baby on my lap, watching his face. The voice on the other end belonged to a collections attorney in Baton Rouge, and I could hear every word, because Colt had set the phone on speaker to impress his mother.
“Mr. Guidry,” said the lawyer, pleasantly, “I am calling because I have finally been able to serve you. Your address is on file now, and we have a judgment for forty one thousand, six hundred dollars. We will be garnishing your wages beginning next month, and we will be placing a lien on your truck.” Colt put down his fork. For two years he had given our address to every creditor in Louisiana. My husband Ryan had spent a Monday at the post office and the next three evenings at our kitchen table. He had marked every letter for Colt “Return to sender, not at this address.” He had written to every creditor, in plain language, and given them the address where his brother actually slept: the couch of his parents.
Around the table, the family sat frozen. Ryan buttered a roll. His mother, Lucille, put her hand on her chest. His father, Big Roy, who had run a body shop for forty years and had never once been late on a bill, slowly set down his glass. Colt hung up the phone, and I saw him look at his brother with the face of a boy who has been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. “You did this to me,” he said. “You gave them my address.” Ryan finished chewing. “I gave them the true one,” he said.
A repossession notice stuck to a driveway gave one wife the afternoon to bring her brother in law back to the truth in Lafayette.
I gave my terms, because someone had to say them and my husband had said enough. “Colt, nobody in this family is going to pay your debts. But nobody is going to leave you alone with them, either. On Monday morning there is a credit counselor at the church who will sit with you and every one of those papers. Ryan will drive you. Your father will give you work at the shop, at the same wage as everyone else. You will pay back every dollar, in installments, and you will never again give an address that is not your own.”
Colt stared at the tablecloth for a long time. Then his shoulders began to shake. “I did not mean to hurt your baby,” he said, to me. “I never thought they would take your car. I was so afraid of Mama finding out.” He told us everything, with his voice cracking. The payday loans had started with a four hundred dollar emergency. The credit cards had followed. He had been ashamed to tell anyone, and had borrowed from cousins to cover the minimums. By the time he stopped, he owed money to nineteen people.
It was then that Colt jumped up from the table, snatched the stack of collection letters that Ryan had laid beside his plate, and ran for the front door, meaning, I suppose, to throw them in the bayou. He pulled the door open and ran straight into the chest of Big Roy, who had left the table with surprising speed and had gone around by the hall. Big Roy did not say a word. He simply took the letters out of the hands of his younger son, folded them once, and put them in the pocket of his shirt, as though he were receiving a delivery.
“Son,” he said, quietly, “come and sit.” They sat on the porch swing together, the old man and his thirty year old boy, for an hour, while the rest of us cleared the table. I watched through the screen. Big Roy did not raise his voice. He talked, and Colt nodded, and at one point my father in law put his arm around him. When they came back in, the eyes of Colt were red. He walked up to me, took the tiny hand of the baby, and said, “I am sorry about the car. I will make it right.”
The money consequences were long but fair. The credit counselor negotiated the forty one thousand, six hundred dollars down to twenty six thousand, four hundred, in payments of three hundred and fifty dollars a month for six years, taken from the paycheck Colt now earned at the body shop. The repossession company paid the lawyer fees of Ryan and the cost of the three days without a car, and sent a letter of apology. Colt moved from the couch to the apartment above the shop, with his own lease and his own mail slot.
In the name of the grandfather of Ryan, Dewey, who passed in 2014, we started the Dewey Landry Fund. It pays for credit counseling, debt negotiation and legal help for families caught in the debts of a relative, in Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia parishes. In the first year we counseled two hundred and six households and cleared eleven wrongful repossessions. One was a retired school bus driver from Broussard whose truck was taken because of the loan of a nephew. The fund had it back in her driveway in three days, with a ribbon on the mirror.
On the first of every month, Colt walks into the kitchen of our house in Lafayette with an envelope of receipts and lays them on the table, one at a time, like a boy showing his homework. Ryan looks them over and pours him a cup of coffee. Last month, when the final collection letter was stamped paid, Colt took it to the post office himself and mailed it back to the attorney with a note that said, “Thank you for finding me.” Then he drove to our house and parked, quite deliberately, in our driveway.