I found out why Brent used the address in Sand Springs by driving there myself on Saturday morning with Marlys, my bookkeeper of thirty one years, who insisted on coming along and brought a thermos of coffee and a pocket calculator. The house had been empty since the sister of Velma, Lorene, moved to a care home in 2022. The grass was cut. That was the first strange thing. The second was the mailbox at the curb, which had a brand new brass lock on it. Marlys stood there with her hands on her hips and said, “Lyle, nobody cuts the grass at an empty house unless they are expecting visitors.”
We had the key to the front door, because I still pay the taxes on the place. Inside, the front room held a folding table, a printer and four banker boxes. Every box was labeled with a name from my life: Hendershot Donuts, Velma Hendershot Estate, Lyle Hendershot Personal. In the first box was a stack of letters from banks in Dallas, Kansas City and Little Rock, every one addressed to me, every one welcoming me as a new borrower. Brent had opened credit lines in my name since the spring of last year, always with this address, and always with the mail rerouted to a box that only he could open. The total on the sheet was two hundred sixty thousand dollars, and it was growing.
Marlys picked up a yellow pad from the table and read it twice. It listed the sale of the eleven shops, with the amount, the day the money cleared and the name of my lawyer on Peoria Avenue, Dale Winkler. At the bottom Brent had written, in his round salesman handwriting, one line: “Loan first, power of attorney second, then Shelly signs everything.” Under that was a date. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, five days away. I understood then that the loan application in Dallas was never meant to be repaid. It was meant to be proof that I had been in debt for a year, so that a judge would decide an eighty year old man needed a guardian.
A brass lock gave one son in law the length of a long weekend to bring his father in law back to the truth in Tulsa.
I gave my terms to Brent and Shelly at my own kitchen table in Brookside on Sunday evening, with the Christmas lights already blinking on the porch of the neighbor across the street. I put the yellow pad, the four banker boxes and the brass key from the mailbox on the table in a row. I said they had until the first of the year to repay every dollar, withdraw every application and sign a paper that Dale Winkler had drawn up that afternoon. I also said I would not call the police if they did. Shelly looked at the key and then she looked at the floor.
Brent talked first, which surprised me, and he talked in the same bright voice he uses to sell a fiberglass pool in July. He said it started with a bad year in the pool business in Broken Arrow, a truck note he could not make and a man in Dallas who lent him money at terrible rates. He said he planned to pay everybody back out of my accounts the day a judge named him guardian. He said he never meant for me to be hurt. Then he looked up at the ceiling light and said the thing I will remember. “Lyle, you had eleven shops and I had a pool that leaked. It just did not seem fair.”
When I told him that fairness did not come with a power of attorney, he snatched the folder off the table, meaning to run it out to his truck and burn it in the barbecue pit behind his house, and he bolted out my front door and down the walk with the folder over his head like a man caught in a rainstorm. Shelly shouted his name. Marlys, who is seventy seven and has never run for anything, put down her coffee cup and said, “Lord, he is fast for a man his size.”
He got as far as the sidewalk in front of the Brookside shops, where a Salvation Army bell ringer in a red apron was standing next to her kettle, and he ran right into the kettle. Coins went everywhere. The folder flew up, the papers fanned out over the sidewalk, and a dozen shoppers began to help, because that is what people do in Tulsa at Christmastime. A boy of about nine stacked every page into a neat pile and handed it to the bell ringer, who handed it to me. “Sir, I believe this belongs to you,” she said, and rang her bell once, very pointedly, at Brent.
Dale Winkler had the application at the Dallas bank withdrawn by Monday noon, and the other lenders closed every credit line after he sent copies of the sale papers and a letter on his firm stationery. Brent signed the repayment paper. He sold his pool business to a competitor, paid back what could be traced and took a job driving for a beverage distributor in Wichita. Shelly stayed in Tulsa. She came to see me every Wednesday for a year, and she never once asked about money. In March she brought me a box of day old donuts from a shop that no longer belonged to me, and we ate two apiece in the car.
In the name of Velma, who passed in 2020, I started the Velma Hendershot Glaze Fund. It pays for locksmiths, credit freezes and lawyer hours for older people whose families have been borrowing in their names in Tulsa, Creek and Osage counties. In the first year we helped nineteen people close eighty one false accounts, and the first was a retired bus mechanic from Sapulpa named Mr. Teague, who walked into my office with a shoebox of letters and said he had been too embarrassed to tell anyone. I told him what Velma used to tell the new kids at the counter. Everybody drops a tray eventually. You just pick it up.
This past Christmas I opened the old Brookside shop one more time, at the invitation of the new owners, for a free coffee morning for the neighborhood. Marlys ran the register. Shelly worked the glaze rack with a hairnet over her curls, and my voice cracked when I saw her. She slid a warm donut across the counter, still dripping, and said, “On the house, Daddy.” I took it and ate it standing up, the way I did in 1974. Outside the bell ringer rang her kettle, and the whole street smelled like sugar and snow.