The name on the filing was Charlene Vossberg.
I had never heard it. Tilda had never heard it. But my son had, because he was the one who had signed the paper that put her there.
Tony came over to the stool with his face the color of the wall and told me, in front of Tilda and a good part of the front row, what he had done. Dean had come to him in July with a form from the Secretary of State and a story. He said the bar needed a second manager on file for the beer account and the liquor license renewal, that it was routine, that his girlfriend Charlene did bookkeeping and would handle it, and that Mom had already said yes but was too upset to deal with paperwork.
Tony signed as an authorized member. He is not a member. He has never been a member. He signed because his uncle told him his mother wanted him to, and he had spent six months being told his mother could not run anything.
Dean had not wanted the bar in his own name. He knew that would not hold. He wanted somebody nobody would think to look at, with a signature from somebody who could be blamed if anybody did.
He had put me on a stool by the door so I would be too far from the books to see him writing a stranger into them.
Tilda, who has delivered beer to that bar for eleven years and is nobodys fool, said the one thing that mattered. A filing signed by somebody with no authority to sign it is not a filing. The state would correct it with one form, and she would hold the new account paperwork until the state record showed one name, and that name would be mine.
I filed the correction the next morning at the Kern County office with Zekes 2019 paperwork in my hand. Then I filed a complaint with the Secretary of State about a false statement, and I named Dean and I named Charlene, and I did not name my son, because the clerk told me that a person who signs a form because he was lied to about it is a witness and not a target.
Charlene Vossberg, it turned out, was not a bookkeeper. She was a woman in Oildale who had let Dean use her name for two hundred dollars and had never set foot on Union Avenue. She said so to the investigator in about four minutes.
Dean did not come back after Labor Day. He left the DEANS PLACE sign leaning against the dumpster. The newspaper ran the photo anyway, with a caption that said the bar had been owned by Rita since 2019, which was more accurate than anything Dean had said into that microphone.
I took the stool out to the alley and left it there. Somebody took it by morning, and I hope they are enjoying it.
I hired the new girls for real, on a schedule, with checks. They are good behind the bar. One of them asked me, the first week, whether it was true that I used to be Zekes charity case, and I told her I was Zekes wife and Zekes bookkeeper and the person who mopped this floor at two in the morning for twenty-three years, and she said that was what she had figured.
Tony works the bar now, four nights a week. He asked me for the job. I made him fill out an application like anybody else, and I checked his references, which was me, and then I hired him and I put it in writing. He is an employee. He is not a manager, and he is not a member, and he knows why.
The sign out front says ZEKES. It always did. I just had the lights fixed.
The jukebox still does not play. I unlocked the cabinet in October and put Zekes 2019 filing back behind the record stack, with the state correction stapled to it, and a note in my own handwriting that says, Tony, if anything happens to me, look in the jukebox.