"Dad."
"Sit down, Kyle."
There was a stool by the workbench, the same high stool, or one just like it. Kyle sat on it. His father did not sit. He went to a steel cabinet in the corner of the garage, one Kyle had never seen opened, and found a key for it on the big ring on his belt, and opened it, and took out a long, narrow, cloth-bound ledger book with a green spine, and brought it back and put it on the workbench and did not open it.
"Your grandfather," Ray said, "ran that lot the way a lot of lots ran back then. On the east side. You understand what I'm saying? He sold a lot of cars to colored folks. To Black folks. That was most of who lived over there by then. And most of them couldn't get a loan at a bank, and a lot of them didn't have much cash. So he sold them on what he called a note. Buy here, pay here. Weekly payments. And he kept a second key." He touched the cover of the ledger. "Miss a payment, one payment, sometimes not even, he'd go get the car back in the middle of the night with the second key. And if the buyer went and got it back, or if they wouldn't give it up, he'd call it in as stolen. Cops'd go pick it up. Cops'd pick up the buyer, too, usually. Nobody ever asked a lot of questions. He'd resell the car the next month. Some of those cars he sold four, five times."
"Jesus, Dad."
"I'm not telling you it was right. I'm telling you what it was." Ray's voice was steady but his hands were not. "I was twenty-four. I'd been working for him since I was sixteen. That Whitfield fella came in, I remember him now that you say it, he was a mechanic, real quiet, knew more about that Buick than I did. And he didn't want a note. He paid cash. Saved it up. Laid it out on my desk in twenties and tens. Eleven hundred and fifty dollars, I'll never forget it, because your grandfather was so mad. He'd wanted that car on a note. Said a car like that, on a note, was worth three thousand over two years. He said I was soft." Ray swallowed. "He said that money was a deposit, as far as he was concerned. Told me to write it up as stolen. Said the man would never be able to prove a thing."
"But he could prove it. He had a receipt."
"He had a receipt because I gave him one," Ray said. "Your grandfather didn't know that. I wrote it out after he went in the back. I don't know why I did. I think I just — I'd watched the man count the money. I'd seen his hands shaking. And I was getting married that fall, and I thought about what it would be like to stand there with my wife and have somebody take my car, and I thought —" He stopped. "And then I made the call anyway. I made the call, Kyle. Because my father told me to. And they picked that man up in front of a day care and kept him two nights. And the prosecutor saw the receipt and dropped it, and the old man was furious, and it was never mentioned again. And I never cleared it. I didn't even know you had to. I never thought about it again in my life, not once. Not once until right now."
He put his hand flat on the ledger.
"It's all in there," he said. "Every one. He kept a column. R slash S. Reported stolen. I kept it after he died because I couldn't figure out what else to do with it. I couldn't burn it, it felt like — I don't know what it felt like." He pushed the ledger an inch across the workbench, toward his son. "You're the cop. You tell me what to do with it."
Kyle looked at the ledger for a long time. He did not touch it.
"I don't know, Dad," he said finally. "I don't think it's mine to decide."