Part 3 — Under The Spare Tire
The signal crackled and the old trucker came back on. His name was Gil, and he had been Grandpas friend on Channel 9 for forty years. He cleared his throat and said, Sawbuck told me you would work out the rest, son. Think about the van.
I knew the van at once. Grandpas 1987 Dodge, parked under a blue tarp behind the shop since I was twelve. He used to sit in the driver seat with the door open and listen to the radio. He never drove it, and he never let anyone touch the spare tire.
The lawyer, Mr. Hendricks, had stopped writing. He looked at my father and said, Darren, I suggest nobody leaves this building. Then he called the county sheriff and asked a deputy to meet us at the shop.
The deputy and I pulled back the tarp together. Under the floor mat in the back of the van was the spare tire well. I lifted the tire out and found a green ammunition box wrapped in an oil cloth, and under the oil cloth, a stack of folded papers and a cassette tape.
The first paper was Grandpas real will, signed in March of the previous year and witnessed by Gil and a neighbor. It left the house, the shop, the land, and the old trucks to me, with the recliner and his watch to my father. He had added a line: Darren may have what is his, and no more than what is honest.
The second set of papers was older. Twenty-two years earlier, my mother had worked in the office of a grain cooperative, and she had altered the books to cover for debts my father owed. Grandpa found out. He quietly repaid forty-eight thousand dollars out of his savings and made them sign a confession, which he kept.
That was why they left me with him. They were not working in Nevada. They had fled, ashamed and afraid of the cooperatives board, and Grandpa had agreed to raise me so they could put their lives in order. He never told them he had written it all down.
The statute of limitations had long run out on the old debt, and Grandpa knew it. That was not the point of the papers. He wanted me to know that he had not been abandoned by his son, he had been the one who held the door open for him.
The forged will was another matter. A fresh forgery, on a fresh document, filed with a lawyer only weeks after Grandpa died. Handwriting analysts at the state lab matched the signature to my mothers hand, using samples from her old co-op ledgers. Mr. Hendricks filed the real will, and the probate court accepted it within the month.
Darren and Shelley were charged with forgery and attempted fraud on the estate. They hired no lawyer for the first two weeks, and then they hired a good one and took a plea. The judge ordered probation, repayment of every fee, and a public apology to the court.
My dad asked to see me the day after the hearing. He stood in the doorway of the shop, older than I remembered, and said, I should have called, Wes. I should have called every week for three years. I told him the radio is on Channel 9 on Sundays if he ever wants to talk.
He gets on the air most Sundays now. Gil answers first, and my father listens. I keep Grandpas recliner in the front room, the one my father gave back the day of the hearing. Krista sits in it with a blanket, and I sit on the arm, and the radio hums quietly beside us.