The owner was my grandson’s father-in-law. I stared at the screen because my grandson had never mentioned him, and the man had never been involved with the farm. I asked my grandson what he knew about the business. He went quiet and then said he’d heard the name once, years ago, when his mother was talking on the phone. I called the co-op back and asked them when that sixth card had been issued. They said 2020, and the application had been submitted with my name, my phone number, and a copy of my driver’s license. I told them I’d never signed it. The girl said there was a signature on the application, and when she pulled it up, the signature looked close enough to mine that I understood why nobody had questioned it.
I asked her to read me the addresses attached to the purchases. Every one was a gas station within twenty miles of my grandson’s old house. I called the stations and asked whether they had video from the most recent transactions. One manager still had a receipt and remembered the customer because he’d complained about the card limit. He pulled the transaction record and told me the card had been used by the same person for months. I asked him to describe him. He said it was a man in his thirties who usually arrived in a white pickup. Then he said something that made my stomach turn: the man always had my grandson with him. I called my grandson again and asked him why he’d never told me about the account.
He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him about the sixth card and the nine thousand dollars a year. There was a long silence, and then he asked me whether the co-op had mentioned a second card issued to the same business. I said no. He told me his laptop still had the old farm-account paperwork because he’d helped me scan it years ago. He opened the files while I was on the phone and found an application dated three months after the first card. The applicant’s signature wasn’t mine. It wasn’t his either. But the emergency contact was my daughter — who had been dead since 2018.
