The last page was a single sheet, a letter on the stationery of a bank, and I turned it over and slid it across the table to my daughter. It was a copy of a note that Tyler had signed in October in the back room of a bar in Covington. In it, Tyler promised a man named Vincent Maroney, of Cincinnati, a quitclaim deed to the house on Tates Creek Road in return for the forgiveness of a debt of eighty five thousand dollars. Raymond had found the original in the trash can of the car wash office. The date at the top was three weeks old.
“That is why the man in Cincinnati has my address,” I said. “Tyler sold it.” Sheila stared at the page with her hand still over her mouth, and her face went through four colors. “Daddy, I did not know. I swear on your mother. I knew he was gambling, and I knew about the apps, and I thought it was only your money. I thought if I kept the password I could keep it small. I never thought they would come to the house.” Her voice shattered. Tyler said nothing. His phone buzzed a fourth time on the tablecloth, and a fifth.
I let it buzz. “Sheila, I am going to tell you what I did while you two were deleting my emails,” I said. “On Monday, I took this folder to the Lexington police. Detective Sandra Pike has been reading the phone of Tyler for two weeks, with my permission as the owner of the account. She is sitting in a gray car at the end of the driveway right now, with a colleague from the FBI office in Louisville, because Vincent Maroney is not just a man who lends money. He runs illegal betting in three states. He has been waiting for Tyler to deliver a house.”
A manila folder left face down gave one grandfather the evening to bring his grandson back to his studies in Lexington.
I gave my terms with the folder closed under my hand. “Tyler, you will give the detective your phone, your passwords and your whole story tonight. You will go to the program at UK HealthCare on Monday morning, and you will not touch an app, a game or a ticket for a year. Sheila, you will repay what was taken from the registers, and you will move to the apartment on Euclid that I will rent for you for one year, so that the three of us can start over under separate roofs. My brothers will witness every word, and the lawyer will write it down.”
Tyler pressed both hands against his eyes. When he took them down, he looked about eleven years old. “Grandpa,” he said, “I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to build bridges, like you used to say I would. I started with five dollars on a game, and I won, and I felt like a king. Then I lost, and I could not stand to feel like nothing, so I bet again. I took the cash from the register eleven times and I hated myself every time.” His voice cracked. “I let a man in Cincinnati think he could take your house. I am so sorry.”
That was when the front door opened without a knock, and a man in a camel coat walked into my hall, followed by two others. Vincent Maroney had come in person to collect. He did not get to the dining room. Detective Pike stepped from behind the coat rack with her badge in her hand, and Raymond, who had been waiting on the porch since sunset, shut the door behind the three men and leaned on it. Maroney looked at the badge and tried to bolt toward the kitchen. My brother Roy, seventy seven years old and a former Army boxer, stuck out one long leg, and the man went down on my hardwood floor.
When the detectives had taken Maroney away in cuffs, the dining room was very still. Tyler stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his hands hanging. I got up from the table, which took a while with my hip, and walked to him. I did not hug him at first. I put my hand against his wet cheek and said, “You are my grandson. That is not a thing you earn or lose.” He fell against me, and I held up a hundred and eighty pounds on a bad hip, and I did not let go. Sheila came and put her arms around both of us.
The money consequences were clear. The note was void, since it was signed to cover an illegal wager, and the case against Maroney used it as its first exhibit. The betting apps froze the accounts of Tyler when the Attorney General asked, and part of the two hundred twelve thousand dollars came home. The rest I forgave. The seven million, one hundred thousand dollars from the car wash sale stayed under my name, and one third of it went into a trust to pay for the last two years of Tyler at UK, if he finished his program and stayed clean. The lawyer in Louisville wrote it all down.
In the name of Dorothy, who passed in 2021, I started the Dorothy Hollis Fund. It pays for counseling, treatment beds and tuition help for young adults fighting gambling addiction in Fayette, Scott and Woodford counties. In the first year we helped sixty two young people. One was a junior at Transylvania who had bet his tuition on a basketball game and was sleeping in his car. We paid for the semester, and Raymond gave him a job on the Richmond Road line. He called me last week to say he had passed his accounting exam.
Tyler finished his program in the spring and went back to UK that fall to study engineering again. On the first Saturday of April, with the grass blue on the hills, he came to the Nicholasville Road car wash, the first one, the one I opened in 1972. He took a hose in one hand and a bucket in the other and washed my old truck from bumper to bumper while I sat in a folding chair and watched. When he finished, he held up the tie clip that had belonged to my father, which he had polished until it shone, and clipped it to my collar. “Grandpa,” he said, “you look sharp.”