I put on my glasses and read the line in the shaky handwriting of Mrs. Hanna, one slow word at a time. “To Thaddeus Boone, who drove me home for thirty three years, I leave my black Lincoln, the garage and the apartment above it, together with the strip of lakefront where we fed the ducks, and a trust of three hundred thousand dollars for his care, so that he will never again have to find his own way home.” My throat closed. Mrs. Kowal handed me a clean white handkerchief and waited. The ink was a little smeared in one corner, and I knew she had wept as she wrote it.
Mrs. Kowal sat across from me and folded her hands. “Cordelia came to see me last April, in the Lincoln, with you at the wheel,” she said. “You waited in the car. She told me, Dorothy, I have a grandson who loves this house for the price it will fetch. But the apartment over the garage has been the home of Thaddeus for fifty years, and I will not have anyone sell it out from under him.” She smiled. “She wrote the will in her own hand and had two of us witness it. She also asked me to keep the name of Ruby in the file, because she said you would not have the courage to ask for it.” I wept openly.
On Monday, the lawyer read the will in the library of the big house. Blake sat in the chair of his grandfather, with a legal pad on his knee. When the lawyer reached the garage, Blake put the pad down. “The garage is the entrance to the whole estate,” he said. “Without it, the buyer cannot reach the house. And the Lincoln is a collector car, worth sixty thousand dollars.” The lawyer turned a page. “It is exactly as Mrs. Hanna wrote it, Mr. Hanna. The garage, the apartment, the lakefront strip and the car all belong to Mr. Boone.” Blake looked out the window at the frozen lake, and said nothing.
A line in shaky handwriting inside a red will book gave one grandson the weekend to bring Thaddeus back to the estate in Bratenahl.
I did not raise my voice. Mrs. Hanna would not have wished it. I stood in the library door with my chauffeur cap in my hand, and I said, “Blake, I am not going to put anyone out. You may keep the house, the lawn and all the furniture. All I ask is three things. You will return the keys to the Lincoln, which you took out of my hand. You will say the name of my wife with respect. And you will never again tell a man who taught you to ride a bicycle to find his own way home.” Blake swallowed hard. Then he reached into his pocket, took out the keys and laid them in my palm.
The surprise came on Sunday, when I drove the Lincoln to Trinity Cathedral for the first time in months. The ushers stood on the steps in their dark coats. Word had traveled, as it does in Cleveland, faster than the collection plate. Inside, the dean asked me to stand, and the whole congregation rose. A hundred people shook my hand after the service. An old gentleman, whose wife I had driven to the hospital in the middle of the night, said, “Thaddeus, you were the finest man on Lake Shore Boulevard.” The choir sang a hymn, and I wept openly in the nave.
The money consequences came quickly. Blake had signed a contract to sell the estate to a developer for four million dollars, and the developer withdrew when his surveyor reported that the garage and the lakefront strip belonged to someone else. A house with no driveway, and no lake access, was worth half as much. Blake had borrowed against the sale to cover a margin call on his trading account. His lender called the note. By the end of the month, he sat in the library staring at a stack of statements, an exhausted young man in a rumpled shirt, far from his office in Chicago.
I helped him, because Mrs. Hanna would have asked me to. I told him he could use the garage drive for as long as he kept the house, for one dollar a year. I told him the boat in the boathouse could stay, if he would learn to sail it properly. And I told him that, if he ever needed a ride to the airport, I would drive him, at the regular rate. Blake gave a sad, crooked smile. “Thaddeus,” he said, “I do not know how to say I am sorry.” I told him that he had already said it by standing there, and that was plenty.
My daughter Lorraine drove up from Columbus with her husband and my two grandsons. She stood in the apartment above the garage and said, “Daddy, I should have taken you in. I will never forgive myself.” I took her face in my hands. “Baby,” I said, “you were scared. Now I have a window on the lake, and two bedrooms.” The boys ran through the garage and climbed into the back seat of the Lincoln, running their hands over the leather. The older one said, “Granddaddy, can we go see the ducks?” And my heart turned over.
With part of the trust, I started something Mrs. Hanna would have loved. The Ruby Lee Boone Fund gives free rides, in a clean car, to seniors in Cuyahoga County who have no way to reach the doctor, the church or the grocery store. I drive on Mondays and Thursdays, in the Lincoln, in my cap. On the first Monday we carried eleven passengers. A woman named Odessa, who was ninety, got into the back seat and ran her fingers over the leather. “Mister Boone,” she said, “I have not ridden in a car like this since my husband passed.”
On a bright Sunday in April, with the ice breaking up on the lake, I parked the Lincoln by the old bench. Blake sat in the passenger seat, which he had never done before. In the back seat sat my grandsons, with a bag of bread crusts. The ducks came across the water in a long ragged line, and the boys threw the crusts, laughing. Blake rolled down his window and watched in silence. After a long while he said, “Thaddeus, why did she love this so much?” I looked at the lake. “Because the car can wait,” I told him. “The ducks cannot.”