Tom the bank manager asked if I wanted him to make the call or if I wanted to. I had crossed Gay Street from my sons grand opening, where he told a reporter he built it from nothing and asked me to step out of the photos for the brand.
Three years ago Brian cried at my kitchen table because the bank turned him down, and I gave him eighty thousand dollars, my husbands life insurance, everything I had left. He was weeping so hard he never read the paper I asked him to sign that night. It was not a gift. It was a loan agreement, drawn up properly, giving me a secured interest in the restaurant until it was paid back in full.
Thirty-eight years as a courthouse secretary. I typed a thousand papers just like it. I was not going to hand over my last dollar on a hug and a promise, even to my own son.
He told the newspaper nobody ever handed him a dime. The dime that built his restaurant was handed to him by the woman he asked to go sit in the car.
I did not want to ruin Brian. A mother does not. But I was not going to be erased, either. So I had Tom send Brian a formal notice, through the bank, reminding him of the agreement he signed and the balance still owed, and informing him that his public claim that he built it alone did not match the lien on his own business.
Brian drove to my house that night. He did not come to argue. He came to sit at the kitchen table where it started, and he cried again, and this time he read every word.
He is paying me back now, on schedule. And the next time the paper ran a story on Tuckers, the Knoxville restaurant, there was a new line in it. Owner Brian Tucker credits his mother, Shirley, whose investment made it possible. He wrote that himself. I keep the clipping where I used to keep the coffee can.