The stamp belonged to Wendell Crain, the father of Brandi, my daughter in law. I had known his round blue seal for twenty five years, because it sat at the bottom of every important paper in my life. He was a notary and an accountant on Line Avenue, a heavy man with a gold watch, and he sat beside Rusty at my table every Easter. Terrell, my old manager, laid the power of attorney beside the paperwork from the fire on Hollywood Avenue in 2001. The two seals were the same, down to the tiny crack in the letter C. My son had been in a room with Wendell when he signed.
I did not need Terrell to explain the rest, but he did, gently. The fire in 2001 had paid out nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. I had always believed it was six hundred and ten. Wendell, who prepared the claim, had written a larger number on the form and sent me a smaller check, and kept the difference as a fee. For twenty four years he had been waiting for me to catch it. Now the old man was in trouble with the casinos in Bossier City, and Rusty, who owed Wendell favors and money of his own, had agreed to ask for forty thousand dollars with a paper that said he could.
I sat in my truck in the lot of the Shreveport shop for a long time, with the windows rolled down and the smell of rubber in the air. Odile used to bring me coffee there in the mornings, when the first shop was a single bay and we could not pay the electric bill. I thought about her patience. Then I called my son and asked him to meet me at the shop at five, with his wife and his father in law. I told him it was about the sale. I did not tell him it was about the fire.
A round blue notary seal gave one retired tire shop owner the length of a single Saturday to bring his son back to the truth in Shreveport.
I gave my terms to Rusty, Brandi and Wendell Crain in the break room of the old Hollywood Avenue shop, around the same table where I once counted bills, with Terrell standing at the door and a folder in my hand. Wendell would repay one hundred ninety thousand dollars, the difference between the true claim and the check he sent me, with a note and interest. The power of attorney would be torn up. Rusty would work a year in the shop at an honest wage. If Wendell refused, the folder would go to the state board that licenses notaries. I said it in the soft voice that makes a man lean in.
Wendell started by saying that every accountant makes a fee. Then he saw the check stubs, and his voice thinned. He said he had needed the money for the surgery of his wife in 2001, and had meant to repay it the next year, and then the next. After that, he said, it was too late to explain. Rusty stood very still, his big hands hanging. He asked whether the story was true. When Wendell nodded, my son sat down on a stack of tires and covered his face. “Daddy,” he said, “I did not know. I swear I did not.”
Wendell snatched the stamp and the ledger from the table, meaning to run to his Lincoln and drive to the bank on Line Avenue to make the numbers disappear before Monday, and he bolted through the bay door of the shop with the heavy folder pressed against his belly and the gold watch flashing. Brandi shouted his name. Terrell took a step. I raised a hand, because the big bay door of the Hollywood Avenue shop opens onto a parking lot, and on this particular Saturday the parking lot belonged to somebody else.
The lot was full of folding tables and steaming pots. The Hollywood Avenue Baptist Church was holding its crawfish boil, and four hundred people were standing in line with paper plates, and the smell of cayenne hung in the air like a fog. Wendell ran into a wall of hungry people. A deacon handed him a plate. A little girl handed him a napkin. A kind woman asked him to say the blessing, as he was dressed so nicely. He stood there with a plate in one hand and a folder in the other, and the whole line bowed their heads.
Wendell said a short grace, and then he gave the folder to Terrell. He repaid the money in eighteen months by selling his lake house in Cypress Springs and his gold watch, and the state board suspended his notary commission for good. Rusty worked in the shop for a year, and to my surprise he was good with the customers, who liked his easy laugh. Brandi cried for a week and then began to keep the books for the shop, the right way. She was careful with the numbers. I suspect she had always been.
In the name of Odile, who passed in 2020, I started the Odile Guidry Spare Tire Fund. It pays for tires, brakes and repairs for widows and single mothers in Caddo, Bossier and Webster parishes. In the first year we fixed three hundred and twelve cars, and one grandmother in Minden drove away in a car with four new tires and sat in the lot for ten minutes with her hands on the wheel. She told the mechanic she had not felt safe on a road in four years. He told her about Odile, and they cried together.
Rusty comes to the shop on Sunday mornings now, in a clean shirt, and we open the first bay together, the way I did with Odile in 1981. He takes the left side of the coffee pot and I take the right. There is a picture of her on the wall by the register, laughing in a yellow sweater, and each morning my son touches the frame with two fingers before he turns on the lights. We have not talked about the fire again. We have not needed to.