The deep voice said, “Is this Coachs wife? Is this Mrs. Linda?” And then, softer, “This is the boy he called Number 22. Though I have not been a boy in a long time.”
I told him everything. Travis. The power of attorney. The papers he wanted me to sign by Friday. The footballs headed for eBay.
The judge was quiet, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. “Mrs. Linda, in 1979 your husband found out my father was going to lose our house. Coach paid three months of our mortgage out of his own pocket and never told a soul. He said the only thing he ever wanted in return was for me to make something of myself.”
“You became a judge,” I said.
“I did. And the summer I passed the bar, Coach asked me one favor. He had me draw up a document and put the house into a protected trust in your name, and he had it notarized, and he told me to hide it where only you would look. Inside the first football. 1979. The one with the loose laces.”
I unrolled that paper again and read it while he stayed on the line.
Ray had known, twenty years before he died, exactly which man would try this, and exactly which boy would stop him.
The house could not be sold without my signature, and the trust meant no power of attorney could touch it. The judge looked at the papers Travis had left and saw that the signature I did not recognize was not mine and had never been mine. He made some calls to people in Abilene who handle exactly that kind of thing.
Travis did not go to eBay. He went to a meeting with a lawyer who was not on his side, and he gave back every paper he had tried to make me sign, and he does not put his boots up in Rays recliner anymore.
Forty-one footballs are still on the shelf in the den. I dust them every Sunday after church. And once a year, a judge from Austin drives all the way to Abilene just to sit in the den and look at them with me.