My nephew Russell arrived at the parking lot of the L Auberge in nine minutes, in his gray Lexus, with his tie off and his collar open. He is a lawyer in Sulphur, forty six, round and calm, and he walked straight past DeAndre and the father of Brooklyn as if they were furniture. He got into my Buick and shut the door. “Aunt Ernestine, let me see the paper,” he said. I handed him the copy that I had folded in my purse. He read it under the dome light, and his face went through a sequence of expressions I had last seen on a boy who had been caught with a frog in church.
“This is a personal guarantee,” he said. “Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, on a loan to Gulf Coast Auto Spa. That is the car wash chain of the father of Brooklyn.” He looked up. “They told you it was for the honeymoon?” I nodded. I had signed it in my own kitchen on a Tuesday evening, with my reading glasses on, because my grandson had put the pages in front of me and said, Grandma, it is only a travel form. I had trusted him as I had trusted him since he was seven. Russell tapped the signature line. “Notary stamp. Dated the fourteenth. Aunt, you were at the doctor on the fourteenth.”
He was right. I had been in the office of Dr. Marchand all that afternoon, for my knees, and the receptionist would swear to it. The notary whose name was on the stamp was a cousin of the mother of Brooklyn, a woman who had never set foot in my house. The guarantee was void on its face, Russell said, and worse, it was a crime to present it. The father of Brooklyn, a stout man named Gerald Pitre in a tuxedo, was walking across the parking lot toward my car with the document in his hand and a smile that was trying very hard to be a smile. “Aunt Ernestine, stay here,” Russell said.
A place card carried out of a ballroom gave one grandmother the evening to bring her grandson back to the table in Lake Charles.
Russell got out of the Buick and stood in the lot with the headlights shining on him. Gerald Pitre stopped three steps away. They did not speak for a moment. Behind them the doors of the hall opened, and the band, I could hear, began something slow. “Mr. Pitre, I am the attorney for Mrs. Bullock,” Russell said, mildly. “I have a copy of the guarantee you are holding. I also have a statement from the office of Dr. Marchand, and a call into the Calcasieu sheriff. I suggest you hand me that paper, and go back inside, and finish your daughter wedding.” Gerald looked at the paper in his hand. Then he gave it to him.
DeAndre came slowly across the lot to my window. He was a handsome young man in a black tuxedo, with a bow tie hanging loose, and he looked about ten years old. I rolled down the glass. “Grandma, I did not know what it was,” he said. “the father of Brooklyn said it was just a formality. He said it would help me get started in the business.” His voice cracked. “I should have read it. I should not have laughed. I do not know why I laughed.” I studied his face for a long time. “DeAndre, you laughed because you wanted them to like you,” I said. “I have known that feeling. It is not a crime. It is only a weakness.”
We went back inside together at ten minutes past nine. The band stopped playing, and two hundred people turned to look. Celeste, the banquet manager whose prom dress I sewed in 1991, met us at the door with a tray of champagne. She handed me my name card, which she had fished out of my purse in the parking lot. Then she led me, with a hand under my arm, to the head table, where she had instructed the staff to set a gold chair with my name on it. DeAndre pulled it out for me. At the table, Brooklyn rose, white faced, and said, in a thin voice, “Miss Ernestine, I apologize.”
I looked at her kindly. “Brooklyn, you are young,” I said. “When I was young, I also thought a woman was measured by the seat she took.” I patted the chair beside me. “Sit down, baby. Eat your cake.” She sat. Then the band struck up again, and Celeste cut the cake, and some of my old students from Barbe High School came across the floor to hug me, one at a time, in their formal clothes.
The money consequences were handled in a week. The guarantee was returned to me, torn in four pieces by the hand of Gerald Pitre himself, with an apology on the stationery of his car wash. The bar bill was paid by the family of Brooklyn, since I had refused the final payment, and the reception went on until midnight. DeAndre, to my satisfaction, took a job as a delivery driver for a medical supply company, working his way up from the bottom, rather than starting at the top of anyone business. He sends me a hundred dollars a month, which I put in a coffee can.
In the name of my mama, Odessa, who passed in 1998 and who taught me to read a contract before I signed a dress, I started the Fine Print Fund. It pays for legal review, notary checks and counseling for older people in Calcasieu, Cameron and Jefferson Davis parishes who are asked to sign papers by relatives. In the first year, we helped forty seven people. A retired seamstress of seventy nine, in a straw church hat, brought a folded form to the office and said, “My grandson said it was a birthday card.” I put on my glasses, and I read it aloud.
In June, DeAndre and Brooklyn came to my house for Sunday dinner, with a pie. They sat at my table, which is plain and old, and ate my smothered chicken and rice and gravy. Brooklyn asked me, with her eyes on her plate, whether I would teach her to sew. I took her upstairs to my sewing room. I showed her the old Singer, and a bolt of blue cotton, and I put a pin in her hand. “Hold the cloth like this,” I said. She held it. “Good,” I said. “Now never sign anything you did not read.” She laughed, and I laughed, and the machine began to hum.