Wallet

Tired of losing his wallet to what he calls small-time pickpockets and grifters, my grandfather, at seventy, makes a phony one. He stuffs the phony wallet with expired food coupons grandma hasn't thrown away but will never use and a worn slip from a fortune cookie that reads, "Do not go gentle into that good night."

On the back of my grandparent's bedroom closet door, he tries the wallet in the back pocket of his pants. It hangs out fat with desire. "All oyster," he says to me, "no pearl."

We drive to Spokane to the mall where he says he lost the last one. He tells me that I am the wheelman, left behind in the car, while my grandfather "cases the joint." I shouldn't be the wheelman. I'm barely thirteen and should be in school. He opens the car door and looks both ways before saying, "This will be the stuff for memories, boy." As he walks away from the car towards the department store, I'm thinking he needs to stay at home more.

Once he took me and my dad with him to buy his funeral plan. The funeral director said that the plan included a prepaid burial suit. My grandfather made him throw in an extra pair of pants because he had never bought a suit with less than two pairs of pants in his life. "Just throw them in the casket with me," he shouted. "I want to be ready."

I say it, "I want to be ready," over and over, as I sit in the front seat of my grandfather's Dodge Dart, my fingers gripping and then regripping the leather steering-wheel cover. I should be in school right now, but the old man says this can't wait and so I have to drive him all the way to Spokane and be his "wheelman", whatever that means.

In the store, my grandfather is an old man trying to act feeble and childlike, and he overdoes it like stage makeup on a high school actor. He has even brought a walking stick for special effect. Packages of stretch socks clumsily slip from his fingers. He must have ten packs of ten pairs of socks, a hundred pairs of socks. He bends over farther than he has bent in years to retrieve them, allowing the false billfold to rise like a dark wish and be grappled by the passing shadow of a hand.

Then the unexpected happens. The thief is chased by an attentive salesclerk. Others join in. The thief subdued, the clerk holds up the reclaimed item. "Your wallet, sir. Your wallet." As she begins opening it, searching for identification, my father runs toward an exit. The worthless coupons and fortune cookie slip float to the floor.

Now my grandfather is in the car, shouting for me to drive away. He throws ten packs of economy stretch-socks into the back seat and is shouting "Drive fast, drive fast." There will be time enough for silence and rest when we get on the road. Right now though, we are both stupid with smiles, minus one phoney wallet but rich with one hundred pairs of socks and a really cool memory.