Three days after my father turned ninety, my two older brothers walked into the pawn shop I own and set his birthday gifts on my glass. At the party Howard told the table Pop only gave me a watch “because he feels sorry for the one nobody waits up for.” They wanted $5,000 for the pair. Neither knew whose shop it was.
Pop handed them out that Saturday in the back room of a catfish place off the highway, three wooden cases in a row beside a sheet cake.
Gold, all three. The heavy kind he’d been paying on since Mom died.
He’d had our initials put on the backs.
“Keep them on you,” Pop said. “The house goes to whoever’s still wearing theirs when I’m gone. Roslyn has it in writing.”
Everybody laughed.
Roslyn Nash has done his paperwork since 1988, and she didn’t.
Howard held his up to the light and turned it. “Jan doesn’t even have anywhere to be,” he said. “What’s she need to know the time for?”
Magdalena snorted into her napkin. Antoine grinned at his plate.
I put mine on and finished my cake.
Twenty-two years in the Marine Corps teaches you which rooms aren’t worth it.
What I never told them, because neither of them ever asked, is what I did after I got out.
They think I work a register somewhere in Shreveport. Howard calls it my little retail thing.
Six years ago I bought a pawn shop on the south side from an old man named Gaines. I kept his name on the sign and I kept his clerk.
Tuesday at 10:40 I was in the back office doing the gold count when the door chime went.
The camera monitor over my desk showed two men in church shoes.
I knew the bald spot before I knew the faces.
Bartosz had the counter. He’s twenty-four, eats the same pickle sandwich every single day, and has never once been on time.
Howard set two wooden cases on the glass and flipped them open like he was dealing cards.
“Eighteen karat,” he said. “Swiss. Our father’s. He’s ninety, he won’t remember who got what.”
Antoine stayed back by the guitars with his hands in his pockets.
Bartosz put his loupe in and weighed the first one. Then the second.
“I can do thirty-four hundred for the pair,” he said. “Outright.”
“Five,” Howard said. “These ran five apiece new.”
“Thirty-four.”
Howard looked at Antoine. Antoine looked at the floor.
“What about the house?” Antoine said.
“There’s no house thing. That was Pop being Pop. Roslyn humors him.”
I got up.
I walked out of the back with the gold book still open in my hand.
Antoine saw me first. His mouth opened and nothing came out of it.
Howard turned around slower.
“Jan? What the hell are you doing back there?”
“Counting,” I said.
“You WORK here?”
“I OWN THIS SHOP, Howard.”
Bartosz took his loupe out very slowly and set it down.
Howard laughed once. Then he looked at the license framed on the wall behind me, the one with my name on it, and stopped.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Then you can do better than thirty-four.”
That was it. That was the whole thing. Not one word about Pop.
“Thirty-four is fair,” I said. “Bartosz, write it up.”
“Jan, come on. Family rate.”
“That is the family rate. Strangers get thirty-one.”
“Howie, let’s just go,” Antoine said.
“No. She’s paying us.” He slapped his license on the glass. “Go on. Write it, Miss Owner.”
So we did.
Two IDs. Two right thumbprints. Two signatures under OUTRIGHT SALE, NO REDEMPTION.
I counted the cash out myself, hundreds, onto the glass between us.
Howard folded his into the money clip Pop gave him for his fortieth.
They left the cases.
Bartosz waited for the chime to stop. “Boss, are those your—”
“Yeah,” I said.
I took them in the back to log them. When I lifted the velvet bed out of the first one to check the movement, something white was folded underneath.
A hospital band. The plastic kind that snaps shut.
LOCKHART, EMMETT. ADMIT 03/11.
The second case had one too. ADMIT 03/14.
That was the March he fell in the shower and lay there until morning.
I drove four hours that night. I called Howard eleven times. Antoine’s phone went to voicemail until Friday.
They admitted Pop three times in nine days. I signed every form.
I went home and took the velvet out of my own case.
Folded the same way was the first band. ADMIT 03/09.
Under it was a yellow sticky note in Pop’s square handwriting.
“Did they bring them to you yet?”
I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time.
Wednesday morning Howard texted.
“Need mine back. Antoine’s too. Name a number. Don’t say anything to Pop.”
Twenty minutes later Roslyn called the shop line, not my cell.
“Your father wants all three of you at the house Sunday at one,” she said. “He asked me to remind you to wear your watches.”
“Roslyn. Was he serious about the house?”
“I drew it up in April,” she said. “He’s never been more serious about anything.”
Howard texted four more times that night. The last one said, “PLEASE Jan. I’m begging you.”
I didn’t answer.
Sunday I put mine on and the other two in my jacket pocket, cases and all, with the sale tickets folded underneath.
Pop was at the head of the dining table in his good brown cardigan. Roslyn sat at his right with a folder shut under her hand.
Howard’s wrist was bare. So was Antoine’s. Howard had tugged his cuff down over it anyway.
Pop laid both hands on the tablecloth, palms up.
“Let me see them,” he said. “All three.”
Howard looked straight at me.
I put my hand in my pocket.
Palms up
I took out the two cases and set one in each of his hands.
The tickets came out folded with them. I put those on the tablecloth by his plate, thumbprints up.
Howard said “Pop,” and then nothing after it.
Pop didn’t open the cases. He set them side by side in front of him like salt and pepper, put on his reading glasses and picked up the first ticket. He read it all the way to the bottom, the way he reads a seed catalog. Then the second one.
I’d folded the bands back under the velvet Tuesday night, the way I found them. Nobody at that table but me knew they were in there.
“Outright,” Pop said.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Howard said. “We were getting them looked at. For insurance. Jan was the one who said sell.”
Pop held up one finger without looking at him.
Antoine had both hands under the table. Magdalena had come with him and been told to wait in the kitchen, and she was standing in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder.
My own watch was ticking on my wrist. I could hear it. That’s how quiet it was.
Pop laid the tickets down and tapped the thumbprints, Howard’s and then Antoine’s.
“Thirty-four,” he said. “Gaines always did pay fair.”
Room 412
The first admission they gave him a room at the end of the fourth floor, 412, across from a vending machine that only took exact change.
He wouldn’t wear the gown by itself. He said a gown with your backside out was for dying in. So I drove to the house and got the brown cardigan, and he wore it over the gown all three times, buttoned to the neck.
Every time they let him go home, a nurse cut the band off his wrist with the little scissors on her lanyard. And every time, Pop held his hand out for it.
“Receipt,” he said.
I thought it was the morphine. I put them in his cardigan pocket.
The second time, the eleventh, Howard called the room on speaker. Pop held the phone flat on his chest so I could hear.
“I am slammed, Pop. Slammed. Saturday for sure. You need anything, you tell Jan.”
“Sure, son,” Pop said.
Saturday he didn’t come. Howard is the one who calls. He’s the one who tells people at First Methodist that he handles Pop’s affairs. He booked the catfish room for the ninetieth and gave the toast, and I heard him tell two different cousins he’d paid for the cake.
Pop paid for the cake. I saw him do it.
The third admission, the fourteenth, it was two in the morning and neither of us could sleep with the machine going. He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me a long time.
“What is it you do, Jan? Really. Not the retail thing.”
So I told him. I hadn’t told anybody in the family. I told him about Gaines and the sign and Bartosz and the gold count on Tuesdays.
“Gaines’s,” he said. “South side. I bought your mother’s wedding band off old Gaines in 1971. Paid on it eleven months.”
“He’s retired. It’s mine now.”
“He still pay fair for gold?”
“I do.”
He laughed until the monitor started beeping and a nurse came in.
When she left he made me write the shop’s number on the back of his breakfast menu card. Then he asked me what the difference was between a pawn and a sale, and I told him. A pawn, you’ve got ninety days to come back and buy it. An outright sale, you sign, you give a thumbprint, and it’s gone. No redemption.
“Thumbprint,” he said. “Like the FBI.”
He folded the card in half and put it in the cardigan pocket with the bands.
Sitting at the head of that table, he had the same cardigan on. The left pocket had something square in it.
Wednesday, 6:15 p.m.
“That’s Gaines’s place,” Howard said. “Pop. It’s got his name on the sign. It’s not even hers.”
“It’s mine,” I said. “You read the license.”
I didn’t want to do this at his table. I want that on the record. I reached for the tickets.
“Pop, they’re yours. I’ll tear these up. Nobody has to…”
He put his hand flat on them. Ninety years old and it was like trying to move a brick.
“Leave my paper alone.”
“See?” Howard said. “Even she says it never happened. She’ll tear it up. So it’s nothing. It’s a misunderstanding between family.”
“Howard was going to buy them back, Emmett,” Magdalena said from the doorway. “He told us in the car.”
“The car to here?” Pop said.
She didn’t answer that. She went back into the kitchen and something lid-shaped hit the counter.
Howard leaned his forearms on the table. He does that when he’s about to explain something to somebody he thinks is slow.
“Look. Jan’s been running a pawn shop for six years and didn’t tell a living soul. Not you, not me. What’s that tell you? And she gave us thirty-four hundred on ten thousand dollars of gold, Pop. Ten. She robbed us across her own counter and then she’s going to sit here in her nice watch.”
“Melt was twenty-nine,” I said.
“Oh, melt. Listen to her. Melt.”
Antoine still hadn’t said one word. His wrist was in his lap, and he kept rubbing the place where the watch had been with his thumb.
Pop took his glasses off. He reached in the cardigan, but not the left pocket. The right one. He came out with his flip phone, the one Howard bought him and set up so the letters are the size of postage stamps.
He opened it and pressed the button a few times.
“Wednesday,” Pop said. “Six fifteen in the evening.”
Howard sat back.
Wednesday at six fifteen was nine hours after Howard texted me Don’t say anything to Pop.
Pop read it out loud, slow, the way he read the tickets.
“‘Pop. Don’t let Jan talk you into anything Sunday. That shop she’s been hiding buys stolen gold off anybody who walks in. Call me before you sign something.'”
He looked over the phone at Howard.
“‘Love you.'”
The velvet
Nobody touched their food. The roast was going gray in the pan.
Pop opened Howard’s case. He looked at the watch for a while, the initials on the back, H.E.L. He didn’t take it out. He worked two fingers under the velvet bed and lifted the whole thing up, and the band was there, folded in thirds.
He set it on the tablecloth and smoothed it flat with his thumb.
LOCKHART, EMMETT. ADMIT 03/11.
“You didn’t look under it,” he said.
“Under what? Pop, what is that?”
“That’s the eleventh. That’s the day you were slammed.”
He opened Antoine’s. Same thing. The fourteenth.
Antoine closed his eyes.
“I put those in there the week before the party,” Pop said. “I figured if either one of you ever took that velvet out, you’d know what I was asking. Neither one of you took it out.”
Then he put his hand in the left pocket and took out a square of stiff paper, folded in half and gone soft at the fold. He opened it and turned it around on the cloth so it faced Howard.
The hospital logo. Breakfast Selections. Scrambled, oatmeal, wheat toast, three boxes checked in pencil.
He turned it over.
“In the parking lot,” Pop said. “After the party. You were helping me in the car, Howard. Do you remember what I told you?”
Howard didn’t say anything.
“I said, son, if you ever need money worse than you need that watch, there’s one honest gold buyer in Shreveport. Gaines’s. South side. Take it there and nowhere else.”
“You told me to go there,” Howard said. “You SENT me.”
“I told you where,” Pop said. “I didn’t tell you to go.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. You’d have sold it somewhere. I wanted it sold where somebody writes it down. Thumbprints. Signatures. Roslyn says a judge likes a thumbprint.”
Roslyn said, “I do say that.”
Pop slid the menu card across to me.
On the back, in my own handwriting from two in the morning in March, was the number of my shop.
Roslyn’s folder
Roslyn opened the folder then. She didn’t stand up. She read it sitting down, in the voice she must use for closings.
“‘Each of my children shall be given a gold wristwatch engraved with their initials. On the date of my death, my residence passes in equal shares to those of my children then in lawful possession of their watch and wearing it.'” She looked up. “Lawful possession, Howard. I wrote that part in April. A watch you sold is not a watch you possess. I put it in on purpose.”
“That’s insane,” Howard said. “That’s not even legal. You can’t run a will like a game show. I’ll contest it. I’ll get a guy. He’s ninety. Ninety years old, Roslyn, and he’s playing gotcha with hospital bracelets, you think a judge in Caddo Parish is going to look at that and say sound mind? Come on. Come ON.”
Roslyn said, “He had a capacity evaluation in April. I have it in here too.”
“Then I’ll buy it back. Fine.” He took the money clip out of his jacket, the one from his fortieth, and slapped it down on the tablecloth so hard the gravy boat rocked. “There. Seventeen hundred. It’s all there. Undo it.”
“It says no redemption,” I said.
“I don’t CARE what it says. You wrote it. You can unwrite it. You’re my sister. I carried you on my shoulders at the Red River fair, Jan, I’m the one who taught you to drive, and you’re going to sit there over thirty-four hundred dollars?”
He turned on Pop.
“And you. You want to know why I didn’t come up there? You want to know? Because you’ve been dying since March, and I wasn’t going to sit in that room and watch it while she held your hand and got the house. That’s why. Somebody has to live their life.”
Pop didn’t say anything. He was folding the band from the eleventh back into thirds.
Then Antoine took his hands out from under the table.
He had a fold of hundreds. Seventeen of them, still bent in the middle the way I’d counted them onto the glass. He hadn’t broken a single one.
He put them by my plate.
“I want mine back,” he said. “Write it up, Jan. Whatever the stranger rate is. I don’t care.”
“Antoine, don’t you dare,” Magdalena said from the doorway.
“I sat in the hospital parking lot on the fourteenth,” Antoine said. He wasn’t looking at anybody. “Two hours. I couldn’t go in. I’m not saying that makes it okay.”
Roslyn looked at me over her glasses.
“Janine. You understand that if he’s wearing it the day your father dies, it’s half.”
I understood. It was half the house I grew up in. The one Pop had just put in my hand.
I took the ticket book out of my jacket. I’d brought it with the tickets. I wrote it up at the table. SALE. One gold wristwatch, A.E.L. Seventeen hundred. Antoine signed it and pressed his thumb on the ink pad I keep in the book’s spine. I took the velvet bed out of his case, put the band from the fourteenth on top of the watch, and slid it to him.
He put it on. He left the band where it was.
Howard picked up his money clip. He stood there with it for a second like he was going to throw it.
“Mine,” he said.
“Yours is inventory,” I said.
He went out through the kitchen, past Magdalena, and the screen door banged twice behind him.
Tuesday, 10:52
Two weeks later Antoine drove Pop up to Shreveport. It was the first time he’d ever been in the shop.
He walked in on his cane and set something on my glass. The band from the eleventh, folded in thirds, and the one from the ninth I’d given back to him.
Bartosz wasn’t in yet.
Howard’s watch was in the case by the register, under the lights, H.E.L. on the back where you couldn’t see it. I’d put a tag on it Monday. Five thousand, what he’d said it was worth.
Howard hasn’t called. Not me. Not Pop. Antoine says he drives past the house some Sundays and doesn’t stop.
I’ve got my watch on. Antoine has his. Pop looks at both of them every time we’re in the same room, and he doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t have to.
Pop leaned on the glass over Howard’s and read the tag.
“Five,” he said. “Put those bands in there with it.”
I unlocked the case.
At 10:52 the chime went and Bartosz came in with his sandwich, saw who was at the counter and stopped.
“Morning, Mr. Lockhart,” he said.
If this one got to you, send it to the one in your family who signed every form.
For more family drama with unexpected twists, read about a little girl who caught a roofing crew off guard and the room mom whose story didn’t add up. And for another story of someone standing their ground, see the ballpark seats still in a late husband’s name.
