The police car stopped beside the trailer with its lights turning. Two officers got out, one young and one old, and the older one walked straight to Travis. “Sir, step down from the trailer, please,” he said. Travis tried to smile. He told them this was a family matter and that his mother in law had given permission. I stood in my socks on the warm asphalt and said, “Officer, I gave no such permission. That organ belongs to me, and the envelope in his jacket belongs to me, too.” The older officer looked at me for a long moment, and then he held out his hand.
Travis gave up the envelope. I could see his jaw working. The officer handed it to me, and I broke the rest of the wax and tipped out a folded document on thick cream paper, with a gold seal and a county stamp. I read it by the headlights. It was a warranty deed, recorded in Potter County in 1979, conveying all of the mineral and helium rights under the eleven acres on Eighth Avenue to Armando Reyes, for the sum of one dollar and other consideration. Attached was a note in Armando slanting hand: “Nita, this is for Vanessa. I bought it for her, so she would never have to want.”
I did not understand it at first. Then a young man in a pressed shirt, Jordan, the manager, came out of the glass doors holding his phone. “Mrs. Reyes, I looked it up while you were reading,” he said. “The Panhandle is the helium capital of America. A deed to the helium rights under eleven acres, right next to where the city is building the medical center, would be worth a great deal.” He showed me a number on his screen. It was bigger than the money I had been paid for the rink. I sat down on the curb in my socks and laughed until I wept.
A moving trailer in a parking lot, a sealed envelope in an organ bench, and a deed that had waited forty years to be read.
Vanessa came running out of the building in her party dress. She had heard the sirens and seen her husband in the lights. “Mom, what is going on?” she cried. I held up the deed. I said, “Vanessa, your father bought this for you in 1979, the year you were born, and then he told me to keep it quiet. He wanted you to have it when you were old enough to use it wisely.” She stared at the paper. Then she turned to Travis, who would not look at her. “You knew,” she said. “You knew, and you were going to steal it from my mother.”
The officers took Travis and the two men with the trailer down to the station for questions, and I did not stand in the way. The man with the ponytail turned out to be an honest hauler who had been told a story, and he told the officers every word that Travis had said, including the part about the buyer in Lubbock who did not exist. Travis had hoped to sell my husband deed, forged signature and all, to an energy broker he knew. He would have cleared a fortune and left me in a trailer in Canyon. The county attorney called it attempted fraud on an elderly person. I called it a shame.
Vanessa moved back into the stucco house on Sycamore that week with a suitcase and her two cats. She slept in her old bedroom, under a poster she had never taken down. For three days she hardly spoke. On the fourth she came into the kitchen at dawn and sat across from me with her hands around a mug. “Mom, when you stood up at my party in those rental skates, I laughed,” she said. “I laughed at you in front of ninety people.” I said I had noticed. “I will spend the rest of my life making that right,” she said, and I told her the first step was to pass the tortillas.
We did what Armando would have wanted. We leased the helium rights to a company in Amarillo on fair terms, and we put forty percent of every royalty into a fund at the Amarillo Area Foundation called the Starlite Skate Fund. It pays for birthday parties and skating lessons for children whose families cannot afford either. The new owners from Dallas kept the old name on the sign. They let me keep one Saturday morning every month for the fund, and the first Saturday, a hundred and forty children came, with their mothers and their grandmothers, and they all wanted to see the organ.
The helium broker in Amarillo who had been waiting for Travis called me the following Monday, in a very smooth voice, and offered a quick price for the deed. I thanked him and told him that the deed was not for sale to anyone who had ever been in a parking lot with my organ. He hung up quickly. Jordan, who was listening from the doorway with a mop, gave me a thumbs up and went back to work. I like that boy. I told Vanessa she could hire him as the rink manager for life.
We had brought the Wurlitzer back from the police yard on a rented truck, and Jordan and the maintenance crew set it up again in the corner of the maple floor, under the disco ball. I climbed onto the bench in my good blue dress and found the first chord, and I played “Moon River,” slowly, the way I had for fifty three years of couples skate. The floor filled up. Parents glided past with toddlers on their hips. The old maple creaked in its familiar places, and the whole building seemed to breathe in time with my hands.
At the second chorus, I looked up from the keys. Vanessa was on the floor in a pair of white skates, her own, which she had bought that week. She moved cautiously at first, her arms out, and then she found her balance and skated a full slow lap, past the snack bar and the birthday rooms and the long window facing Eighth Avenue. When she came around to the organ she lifted one hand and waved. I nodded and kept playing. Armando would have laughed, and then he would have cried, and then he would have asked for the next song.