I worked it free, opened it, and the second I saw what Grandpa had hidden in there, I had to set my wrench down and grab the workbench, because it was a transfer-on-death deed for the shop building on Claxton Avenue.
The one with the two bays and the apartment upstairs. The one that has been rented to a tire outfit since 2004 and that everybody in this family assumed the bank owned.
The bank does not own it. Grandpa paid it off in 1998 and never mentioned it, and the deed was filed with the probate office in 2016 with my name on it as the beneficiary, which means it never went through the estate at all. It came to me the minute he died, before the will was ever read, while my cousin was standing in a nice suit making a joke about a rust bucket.
Wrapped with it in that pouch was the current lease, a folder of rent receipts going back nine years, and a key on a bent ring with a paper tag that says BAY 2 in his terrible handwriting.
And a note, on the back of a parts invoice, because that man never once used a clean sheet of paper.
Boy — a man who can rebuild an engine from nothing needs somewhere to do it. That is all this is. I did not leave it to the cousins because they would have sold it to a bank and it would be a coffee place inside a year. You will find this because you are the only one who will ever have that seat pan off. Take your time with her, she is worth doing right.
Twelve hundred a month, and a building with two bays, given to a grease monkey who peaked in high school.
My cousin found out in June. He called me and asked, in a lawyer sort of way, whether I had thought about what was fair, and I told him yes, I had thought about it quite a bit while I was sleeping in a recliner next to his grandfather’s bed for nine months.
He has not called since. His sister has. She came down in the fall and sat in my kitchen and cried and said she had wanted to come and had not known how, and I told her the truth, which is that it was not complicated, you just get in the car.
The tire outfit’s lease is up in the spring. I am going to let them stay in bay one and I am taking bay two.
The Harley runs. It took eleven months and every dollar I had and a carburetor I sent to a man in Georgia twice. She fired on the fourth kick in February and I sat down on the shop floor and did not get up for a while.
I put the pouch back under the seat pan. It is empty now. It seemed like the kind of thing a man ought to leave where he found it, in case there is somebody after me who takes a seat pan off.