"Hutch Vukovich," he said finally. "I went to school with Hutch Vukovich. He used to beat me at everything."
And then he drove the Corvette to the lot himself, and parked it in its spot under the banner, and met the auditor at eight in the parking lot with his tie straight.
The Corvette passed. Every car on the lot was there and in sellable condition. The money for the cars that weren't there was not, quite; Conway Chevrolet was short on two, eleven thousand dollars between them. The auditor, a tired man from Detroit in a short-sleeved shirt, wrote it up and gave Royal Conway thirty days and a letter, and said that in his experience, thirty days was usually the beginning of the end and occasionally the beginning of something else, and he had never been able to tell which ahead of time.
That afternoon, Royal Conway did two things that were noticed around Elyria. The first was that he called a meeting of his thirty-nine employees in the service bay and told them the truth about the floor plan, and the second was that he drove, in his own Oldsmobile, to Furnace Street.
My mother was asleep when he knocked. I answered. He was a tall heavy man with silver hair and a radio voice, and he stood on our porch with his hat in his hands in the actual way men did in old movies, and asked if he could speak to Mrs. Haydu. I woke her up. She came out in her bathrobe with her hair down and her face creased from the pillow, and he stood on the porch and apologized to her, for the phone call, and for the eleven hundred dollars, and for what his son had said at the church, and, in a lower voice, for the man in the tie on the used lot, who should have done better by her.
"Your son has already apologized to mine," my mother said. "And from what I hear, he worked three nights to make it right. I'd say the Conways have done enough apologizing on my porch for one week, Mr. Conway."
He tried to give her the sixty dollars back. She would not take it. He tried to give it to me. I would not take it either. In the end, he left it with Father Lisowski for the roof fund, along with the five that was already there, and I have always thought that roof was held up, a little, by the dumbest Saturday of my life.