Paid in Full
“Sue us, old man. You’ll be dead before it gets to court.”
My father told me Mr. Prescott said it with a laugh. Standing by the garage of a three-story lake house that my dad had just spent nine weeks painting by hand. In August. By himself. At seventy-two years old.
Dad called me from his truck afterward. I was standing in my kitchen in Brookfield, stirring a pot of chili, when my phone rang.
“Hi, Dad. Are you finished? Did they love it?”
“They loved it,” he said. “Mrs. Prescott took about two hundred pictures.”
“That’s great! So they paid you?”
There was a little pause.
“Not exactly,” he said.
I turned off the burner.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
And he told me. About Mr. Prescott pulling him aside by the garage. About the invoice. About we’re over budget, we’re not paying that. About sue us, old man.
About Mrs. Prescott, standing right there on the porch she’d had him paint three different shades of white, laughing.
Paint’s on the house, Gerald. You can’t exactly take it back.
I was so angry I could barely breathe.
“Dad. I’ll drive up there right now. I’ll call a lawyer. I’ll call the newspaper. I’ll call the Better Business Bureau. I’ll—”
“No, you won’t,” Dad said.
He didn’t sound angry.
That was the strange part. My father had just been cheated out of four thousand eight hundred dollars by two people who laughed at him and told him he’d be dead before he saw a dime.
And he sounded almost cheerful.
“What did you say to them?” I asked.
“I said, ‘That’s fair.’”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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