Part 3 — The Reno Dealer
The paper Ted had handed me was a photocopy of a record from a dealer in Reno, dated October of 2019. It described one Morgan silver dollar, 1893-S, offered at $41,000, with the notation: Payment withheld pending verification. The seller was listed as Joanne Ambrose, my wife, and under the signature was the line: Delivered by agent, Patricia Ambrose.
Trish had dropped her coffee on the linoleum, and it spread in a slow brown map toward the tartar sauce. Nobody moved to clean it. “That was supposed to be buried,” she said, in a small voice, and then she heard herself and put a hand over her mouth. Cody turned in his chair and looked at his wife as if she had grown a second face. “Trish. You told me my father sold it himself.”
Ted explained it to the hall in the plain voice of a man who has handled a lot of money. In the fall of 2019 Trish had taken the 1893-S to Reno on her own, with a letter of authority that appeared to be signed by Joanne, who had died eighteen months before. A dealer who knows his business checks a letter. This one had done so, and had found the date wrong and the pen too fresh, and he had called Ted, whom he knew from the shows. Ted had asked him to keep quiet and keep the piece.
Cody stood up from the table with the particular slowness of a man who has been caught at the bottom of a hole. “I sold the others,” he said. “I did. At the pawn shop in Medford, for the casino. I did not know about the 1893. Trish told me she had an easy buyer for it, that you had agreed.” “And you believed her,” I said. “I wanted to,” said my son, which is the most honest sentence a gambler can say.
The widows at the next table did what women of that age do in an emergency. One of them, a retired school secretary named Dolores, had already telephoned the sheriff. The deputy who came was off duty and wore a Ducks sweatshirt and an apologetic face. He asked Trish and Cody to come with him for a conversation, and he asked the hall to forgive the interruption of the Bingo. The hall, to its credit, said it would wait.
The law was not complicated, though it moved through several desks. Selling property by a forged letter of authority is forgery and theft by deception in Oregon, and in Nevada it is a felony too. The dealer in Reno, Mr. Calloway, mailed the 1893-S back to Coos Bay by insured post as soon as the district attorney asked, and he enclosed a letter of apology for the trouble. I opened the box at my kitchen table with a magnifier and a cup of coffee and held the piece up to the light.
It was the one my father bought the week I was born. The mint mark was a clean, deep S, and the tiny nick on the edge was exactly where I remembered it. I sat there a long time with the dollar in my palm, an old man with two hundred and four photographs in a bread bag and a silver dollar the size of a biscuit. The great-grandson came over that weekend. I let him hold it with both hands, and he asked if it was magic. I said yes.
Trish pleaded guilty to forgery, and Cody to theft from his father and to the sale of the others. Both received probation and supervision, and Trish received a short term in the county jail for the forgery. The court ordered full restitution, and the house on Ocean Boulevard, which they had said they would lose, was sold to pay it. The pawn shop in Medford was ordered to return what it still held, and Ted drove down in his Buick to collect the last of it himself.
Cody was ordered to attend a program for people who cannot leave the machines, and, to the surprise of everybody, he went. He showed up at my door in November in a clean shirt, holding a paper bag. Inside was a green notebook with a number written on every page, one for each day he had stayed away from the casino. The last number was forty-one. “Dad, I would like to try again.” “Then try,” I said. “Slowly.”
Ted stayed at my house for a week. We sat on the porch in the evening with a thermos of coffee and talked about the Ranger, about midnight watches, about boys we had known who did not come home. He told me that his wife had passed the winter before, and that a house in Sacramento is a very quiet place. I said that Coos Bay was always a little loud, and that he was welcome to stay as long as he could stand the gulls.
My father began the collection with a nickel from a pay envelope, and in the end it was an old shipmate who proved that the real treasure was never in the case. I put the 1893-S back in its blue folder, in the safe of the bank, with the photographs and the signed letter of the appraiser, and I wrote the date on the label myself.
On the second Friday of December, the fish fry at Post 3440 was crowded. Rockfish, coleslaw, Bingo after. Cody ran the raffle again, with the microphone, and this time he stayed out of the bar. Ted sat at my table in his Ranger cap, and the widows brought us pie. When Cody called the winning number, the hall cheered, and I looked at my son from across the room, and he lifted two fingers in a wave. It was a small thing. I waved back.