“…the handle moved, and the little door of the safe opened with a soft metallic sigh,” I might have written in my diary that night, if I were a woman who kept one. Instead I knelt on the cold concrete floor of Jim garage, seventy five years old, with my knees aching and my breath fogging in the unheated air, and I reached into the gray fire safe with both hands. Inside lay a single folded document in a plastic sleeve, an envelope addressed to me in Jim square printing, and a small brass key on a loop of fishing line. The document was the title to the 1967 Corvette Stingray.
I carried it all into the kitchen and spread it on the table under the yellow lamp. The title was the original, issued by the Commonwealth of Kentucky, with a stamp of transfer dated March 2021. The new owner, in clear black letters, was Carol Ann Beasley. Not Jim and Carol. Just Carol. Beside it was a notarized statement in which James R. Beasley, being of sound mind, assigned all right and interest in the vehicle to his wife, to be hers alone, free of any claim by any heir or family member. The notary stamp read Mike Lawson, Warren County.
I opened the envelope. Jim letter was written on the back of a parts invoice, in his careful capitals. Carol, if you are reading this, Travis has been asking about the Corvette. I know what he is. He is my brother son and I tried to love him, but he cannot keep a dollar. I gave him one chance to be honest and he turned it down. This title is yours. The coffee can on the bench held a copy; the real one is in this safe. If anyone sells this car without you, it was never theirs to sell. Call Mike Lawson. He will know what to do. Jim.
A fire safe under the workbench, a title signed over in 2021, and a red Stingray driven back to church on a Sunday.
Mike Lawson was a retired attorney who now spent his mornings at the courthouse annex in Bowling Green, drinking coffee with the clerks. He answered my call on the second ring and said, in his dry Kentucky drawl, “Carol, I have been waiting two years for you to ring me.” I drove into town that afternoon with the title on the seat beside me, and he met me in a small paneled room, wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, and examined every page with the care of a jeweler. He pronounced it genuine. He said the sale had been void from the moment the truck pulled out of my drive.
The collector in Nashville, Mr. Prentice, turned out to be an honest man. Mike telephoned him that evening and explained matters, and Mr. Prentice was silent for a long moment. Then he said that Travis had represented the car as his late uncle estate property and had produced what looked like a clean title, with a signature that Mr. Prentice had never questioned. He said he was sick about it. He said he would return the car to Kentucky at his own expense within the week, and that he trusted Mike to see that he recovered his eighty seven thousand dollars from the seller.
That left Travis. He was thirty eight, a handsome, pleasant, careless young man with Jim jaw and a gift for vanishing when it mattered. He was living in a rented house in Glasgow, behind on the lease, and the eighty seven thousand dollars was already half gone, on debts, a used truck, and a long weekend in Gatlinburg with a girl he did not mention. Mike and I drove to see him on Saturday. He opened the door in a gray hooded sweatshirt and stared at us as though we were two ghosts.
I will say this for Travis: he did not make excuses. He sat us down at his kitchen table, among the unopened mail and a cold pizza box, and said he had been planning to tell me. He said Jim had promised him the car, years ago, when he was twenty, and he had never forgotten it. He said that when Jim passed, the promise had felt like a debt. Mike explained, mildly, that a promise made over a beer is not a title. Travis nodded. He said, “I know. I know. I just needed the money.”
I told him what I would do. He would repay Mr. Prentice from what remained, and from the sale of his truck, and then in monthly installments to the rest. He would get a job, and keep it. He would come to the farm every second Saturday to help with the heavy work, since that was what he had said he wanted to do in the first place. If he missed a Saturday, Mike would call the county attorney. Travis looked at the table for a long time. Then he reached out, and took my hand, and said, “Aunt Carol, I am sorry I put a padlock on your garage.”
The Stingray came home on a flatbed truck on a bright Thursday in November. Mr. Prentice rode along, in a tweed cap, and shook my hand at the end of the drive. The car was as I remembered it, long and low, red as a stoplight, with white stripes down the hood and the chrome Jim had polished for forty years. Travis stood beside it, in a clean work jacket, with his hands in his pockets, and when the driver lowered the ramp, he looked at me, and I nodded, and he backed it carefully into the garage.
On Sunday morning, I took the Corvette to church. It was the first time since Jim passed that anyone had driven it. Travis sat beside me, in a pressed shirt, gripping the door handle. The engine growled like a contented cat. We rolled up to First Baptist at ten minutes to eleven, and the men standing on the church steps stopped talking, and their mouths fell open. Old Mr. Hinton, who had known Jim for fifty years, took off his hat. I turned off the ignition and said, softly, “Well, Jim. Here we are.”