The frail old voice said, “Pelletier. Arnie Pelletier. Jimmy Thibodeau made me promise, forty-six years ago, that I would answer this phone if it ever rang. I am Father Roy. I witnessed what you two did in 1978.”
I told him about Kevin and his brother, the sunglasses, the photographs of the tools, the developer, the end of the month, and Kevin saying there was never a partnership.
“There was a partnership,” Father Roy said, “and I signed it as a witness at the rectory kitchen table in the spring of 1978. You and Jimmy were equal partners in P and T Auto, the business and the building both. And there was a survivorship clause. When one of you passed, his share went to the other, not to anyone else. Jimmy insisted on it. He said the shop should die with the two of you, not get carved up by anybody who never turned a wrench in it.”
I crawled back under old Bessie that night with the coffee can in my hand and read the document by flashlight, and there were our two signatures, and Father Roys under them, dated 1978.
Kevin said his father carried me for forty years. The paper taped under that old lift said we carried each other, and that Jimmy made sure I would never be put out of the place we built.
The partnership agreement was real, notarized, and witnessed by a priest who was more than willing to swear to it. The survivorship clause meant that when Jimmy died at that workbench with a wrench in his hand, his half of the business and the building came to me. Not to his boys. There was nothing for them to sell.
A lawyer in Lewiston read it over, shook his head, and told Kevin and his brother to put their cameras away.
I did not throw the boys out in the cold, whatever they tried to do to me. I offered them a fair price for the sentimental things of their fathers, his good toolbox, his chair, and I meant it. They did not take it. That is their choice to live with.
P and T Auto is still open on the same corner. We still fix every snowplow in the county. And old Bessie, the hydraulic lift nobody has used since 1995, I keep her greased and ready now, out of respect for the best partner and the best friend a man ever had, who hid the truth under her for the day I would need it.