Heartfelt stories from the countryside
The collections call came on a Monday: $250,000, ninety days past due, on a line of credit I never opened. The bank said I’d co-signed it with a dentist from Valdosta named Noreen Gatlin. That afternoon, Noreen Gatlin called me, absolutely certain I was the thief.
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They paid $280,000 to have my whole luxury ranch to themselves for a week. The father was 79 and had built one of the biggest software companies in the country. His son and daughter hadn’t spoken to each other in six years. On the first night, he took me aside and asked for my help deciding which one would get everything.
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I own forty enclosed car carriers and I hadn’t driven one myself in ten years. Then a chemistry teacher from Baltimore insisted on riding along with her father’s 1963 roadster, and I couldn’t let any of my drivers deal with her. Five days, 2,300 miles, and one auction that would decide whether she kept her father’s house.
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My daughter set a manila envelope next to my plate at Sunday dinner. Inside were bank records, a house address and a photograph of me hugging a woman on a porch in Weaverville. She wanted to know who the woman was. The answer was harder than she thought.
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The first morning, I thought she was a trespasser. The second morning, I called the sheriff. The third morning, she handed me a property survey and told me the rose garden outside my kitchen window had never been mine.
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The last time Celine Archambault stood in my tasting room, she told me I’d stolen her family’s vineyard. Twenty years later she came back with a cashier’s check, her 401(k) statement and a request I wasn’t ready for.
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Dad called a family meeting at the kitchen table, which he hadn’t done since Mom died. My brother came from Dallas. And Dad set a fourth chair for the man who had milked our cows every morning since 1990.
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My cash offer was $200,000 higher and could close in ten days. The other buyer had a mortgage and a four-page letter. The 88-year-old sellers invited us both to Sunday lunch, and then told us they weren’t choosing between us.
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My mother refused to fly, refused my money, and refused to visit my island for eight years. Then, packing up the house she’d lived in for fifty-eight years, she admitted she had never seen the ocean. She gave me one condition for the trip: we had to go through Biloxi.
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Her son and daughter sued me for every dollar I’d moved out of their mother’s accounts. I could explain all of it except one wire for $412,000. Not because I didn’t know where it went, but because I’d promised her I would never tell.
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