My father has introduced me as “the girl with the taco truck” for eleven years, and on Saturday he did it to the man buying half his shop. “Don’t mind Alyssa, she just feeds people,” he said, with my brother grinning beside him in his dealership polo. Then his new partner asked who the landlord was.
The shop is thirty-one years of my father’s life, and Saturday was the day he was going to make it twice the size.
Sizemore Small Engine. Last unit on the end of a brick row in Muncie, between a vape place and a laundromat that closed in March.
He was turning sixty-six that week, so Celeste hung a banner over the bay door and called it a double party.
Celeste is wife number two. She brought a sheet cake with his name in blue gel and the six on the left smeared into a thumbprint.
I brought the food. Obviously.
Two hundred tacos off my truck, parked out front with the window up, free.
“You don’t mind, right?” Dad said on the phone that Tuesday. “Not like you’re busy on a Saturday.”
I had a rehearsal dinner booked that Saturday. Eighty plates. I handed it to my second crew and came anyway.
Monte Walsh showed up at four in a shirt that still had the fold lines in it, carrying a blue folder.
He was buying forty percent. Dad told the whole family at Easter. He never said what Monte was paying, which meant it was a lot.
The plan was the empty laundromat next door. Knock out the wall, double the bays, sell mowers off the floor.
Dad walked him down the line of us like he was showing off a boat.
“That’s Celeste. She’s the boss, don’t tell her.”
“That’s Jordan, my oldest. Runs the whole finance office at the dealership out on 32.”
Then the line he always uses. “The one who made something of himself.”
Jordan did the little shrug he does EVERY single time, like it’s news.
Then Dad got to me, standing by the cooler in my apron with a pan of carnitas.
“And that’s Alyssa, my youngest. The girl with the taco truck.”
Monte stuck his hand out. I wiped mine on the apron and shook it.
“Don’t mind her,” Dad said. “She just feeds people.”
Eleven years of that.
He said it at Jordan’s wedding. He said it to the pastor at Grandma’s funeral. He said it to a nurse in the emergency room while I was on a gurney with a grease burn up my forearm.
I had one truck when he started. A used step van with a bad alternator and a generator I had to kick twice.
I have FOUR trucks now. A commissary kitchen. NINETEEN people on payroll, and every one of them has health insurance.
He has never asked about any of it.
Two years ago Mr. Patel, who owned this whole brick row, decided he was done being a landlord.
I needed a kitchen with three-phase power and a grease trap. The end unit had both, and Mr. Patel would only sell the row in one piece.
So I bought the row. ALL FOUR UNITS. My father’s included.
It took the bank eight months and every dollar I’d put away since I was twenty-three.
Dad’s rent goes to a management office across town. The checks are made out to a company with my initials in it. He’s signed twenty-four of them.
I kept meaning to tell him. Christmas. Easter. Then I’d hear “the girl with the taco truck” and close my mouth again.
Celeste cut the cake. Monte opened his folder on the workbench, between a carburetor and a coffee can of bolts.
“Okay, Leon. Last thing,” he said. “The bank wants the lease assignment signed by the landlord before they fund. Monday.”
Dad waved his fork. “Landlord’s some company. The management lady handles all that.”
“They want the owner,” Monte said. “Not the manager. The name on the deed. I called the office yesterday.”
“And?”
“And they said the owner would be AT YOUR PARTY.”
Dad laughed. Then he looked around the bay, at Celeste’s sister, at the two guys from the mower dealer, at Jordan.
“Somebody’s pulling your leg, Monte.”
“They said she’d handle it in person.”
“She?” Dad said.
Jordan snorted into his beer. “Maybe it’s THE TACO GIRL.”
Everybody laughed. Dad laughed hardest.
“Christ,” he said. “She can’t keep a damn generator running.”
I set the pan of carnitas down on the cooler.
Nobody looked at me. They were all looking at Monte’s folder.
I walked out the bay door to the truck and reached behind the driver’s seat, where a gray accordion file has lived for two years.
The title. The closing papers. His lease, the renewal he signed last fall at the management office without reading a word of it.
When I came back in, Dad was telling Monte the generator story.
He stopped when I put the file on the workbench next to Monte’s folder.
“Alyssa, honey, not now,” he said. “We’re doing BUSINESS.”
I didn’t say anything.
I pulled the elastic band off, took out the first page, and slid it across the workbench to him.
The deed
It was the deed. The recorded one, with the Delaware County recorder’s stamp in the corner and the legal description of the row in that tiny type nobody reads.
Grantee: A.S. Row Holdings, LLC. Under it, in blue ink, my signature. Member.
Dad looked at it without picking it up. He still had cake on his fork.
“What’s this.”
“It’s the deed,” I said.
Monte leaned over and read it. He read the whole thing, top to bottom, the way you read a menu in a place you can’t afford. Then he looked at me, and then at my apron.
“A.S.,” he said.
“That’s her kitchen thing,” Dad said. “She rents a kitchen down the end. Same outfit I pay. Monte, she rents.”
“I own it,” I said. “All four units. That’s the deed.”
Somebody turned the radio down. I think it was one of the mower dealer guys.
Monte didn’t say anything to me. He picked the lease assignment up off the workbench, squared it against the other pages, and closed the blue folder over it.
Then he put his hand flat on top.
“Leon,” he said. “Can I grab you outside for a second?”
The generator
Dad tells the generator story at every party. I could tell it for him.
August of 2014, my first summer. The Delaware County Fair. I had the used step van and a line of forty people and the generator quit at eight-thirty on a Friday night. I called my father because I was twenty-two and that’s who you call.
He came out in his shop shirt with a toolbox, pulled the cover, cleaned the carburetor on my prep counter, and had it running in twenty minutes. Then he stood by my window and told every person in line that his daughter couldn’t keep a damn generator running.
Everybody laughed. Everybody always laughs.
That was the only time he’s ever seen me work.
He knows engines. He can hear a fouled plug from the parking lot. Paper is a different animal. Mom did the shop’s paperwork until she moved to Fort Wayne when I was fourteen, and since then he signs wherever somebody stuck the yellow tab.
Celeste offered to take over the books when they got married. He told her the shop was his business and she could do the house.
So “she’s the boss, don’t tell her” is about the thermostat.
My commissary kitchen is at the far end of the row. Four trucks pull in and out of there every morning, right past his bay door. He thinks I rent it. Twice a year he tells me rent is money down the toilet and I ought to buy something.
I’d planned to take the laundromat myself. Knock out the wall into my kitchen, put in a second line, maybe a fifth truck by spring. The contractor’s number was on my fridge.
Then on Friday, the day before the party, Krista from the management office texted me.
“Guy named Monte Walsh called about the laundromat unit. Wants it leased in his company’s name. Asked who the owner is. What do I tell him?”
I told her to tell him the owner would be at my dad’s party.
At Easter, Jordan had told Dad to let him handle the bank side of the Monte deal. “That’s what I do all day, Dad.” Dad had clapped him on the back across the ham and said, “See? The one who made something of himself.”
Now Dad was looking at Monte’s hand on that folder like he didn’t know whose hand it was.
Twenty-four checks
Dad didn’t go outside.
“Sit down, Monte. She’s messing with you.” He picked up the deed by one corner, like it had grease on it. “Where’d you get this?”
“From the recorder’s office. After closing.”
“Closing on what?”
“On the row, Dad. Mr. Patel sold it two years ago. I bought it.”
“With what?”
Celeste’s sister laughed at that, and then stopped, because nobody else did.
“With every dollar I had,” I said. “And the bank’s.”
He put the deed down. He did the math in his head, with the same face he makes when a customer asks what a rebuild is going to run. Twenty-four months. He’d written every one of those checks himself, at the desk in the back under the calendar from the parts supplier.
“You’ve been cashing my rent,” he said.
“The company has.”
“My own kid.” He said it to the room. “My own kid’s been taking rent off me for two years and coming to Sunday dinner like nothing.”
Jordan set his beer on the cooler next to my carnitas.
“Lys, come on,” he said. “Whatever this is, do it Monday. Monte’s got a bank waiting.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “The bank wants the landlord. I’m the landlord.”
Dad pointed the fork at me. “Then sign it.”
“I want to read it first.”
“Since when do you read anything?”
“Since I bought a building.”
Monte smiled the same closed smile he’d had on all afternoon. “It’s a standard assignment, Alyssa. Jordan went through it line by line. It moves the lease into the new entity so the bank has something to lend against.”
“Then it won’t take long,” I said.
Dad looked at Monte. He looked at Jordan. Thirty people were standing in his bay holding paper plates, and his youngest had asked for something he couldn’t say no to without it looking like something.
“Give it to her,” Dad said. “Let her read it out loud. Since she’s the big shot.”
Line four
Monte took his hand off the folder.
I read it standing at the workbench, between the carburetor and the coffee can of bolts. Nobody sat down.
The first page was the assignment. Assignor: Leon R. Sizemore, doing business as Sizemore Small Engine. That’s Dad.
Line four was the assignee.
It didn’t say Sizemore Small Engine. It didn’t say a partnership, or anything with Dad’s name in it.
It said Walsh Power Equipment, LLC.
I read it out loud, like he asked.
“That’s the new company,” Dad said. “That’s us. Right, Monte?”
“It’s the holding entity,” Monte said.
I turned the page. Dad’s name was on page two, down at the bottom, on a line marked Guarantor. If the tenant didn’t pay, Leon R. Sizemore did. Personally. For a lease that wouldn’t be his anymore.
Behind that was a second lease, typed up and waiting for my signature too. The laundromat unit. Same tenant. Walsh Power Equipment, LLC.
The unit Monte had called Krista about on Friday. The wall Dad had been telling everybody since Easter he was going to knock out.
“So he holds the lease,” Dad said. “So what. It’s paperwork. We’re partners.”
“Your name’s not on it,” I said. “Anywhere. Except the part where you pay if he doesn’t.”
“Jordan looked at it.”
“I did,” Jordan said. “Dad, this is how these deals get structured. The bank wants a clean entity. You don’t want your personal name on a commercial lease at sixty-six.”
“His personal name’s on it now,” I said. “Page two.”
Celeste had come around the cake table. She stood behind Dad with the cake knife still in her hand, frosting on the blade, and read over his shoulder.
She didn’t say anything. She looked at Jordan.
There was one more page in the folder, stapled to the back by the bank. I turned to it.
The last page
Banks make you fill out a form that says who owns a company. Anybody with a quarter or more has to put their name on it. I’d filled one out myself for A.S. Row Holdings, with my hand shaking so bad I had to start over.
This one had two names.
Monte Walsh, seventy-five percent.
Jordan L. Sizemore, twenty-five percent.
His signature was under it, the same loopy J he put on the card for Grandma’s funeral flowers. Dated the Tuesday after Easter.
I didn’t read that one out loud. I turned it around on the workbench and slid it across to Dad, the same way I’d slid him the deed, and put my finger under the name.
Dad took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket.
I’ve seen him do that maybe five times in my life. Menus at Red Lobster. A prescription bottle once. He shook them open with one hand and put them on and bent over the page and didn’t move.
“Jordan,” he said.
Jordan didn’t pick his beer back up. “It’s for when you retire.”
“I’m not retiring.”
“Dad, you’re sixty-six. You’ve got no plan. Monte runs it, you work the counter as long as you want, and when you’re done it doesn’t get split up.”
“Split up with who?”
Jordan looked at me. Then at the floor.
“Leon, nobody’s taking anything,” Monte said. “You keep sixty percent of the business.”
“Of the business,” I said. “Not the lease. They’d own the right to be in this room. You’d own sixty percent of some mowers.”
Dad took the glasses off.
“How long have you two had this?” he said.
“Since Easter,” Jordan said.
Paragraph fourteen
Dad stood there with his glasses in his hand and talked.
He talked to Jordan about the wedding he paid half of and the down payment on the house in Yorktown. He talked to Monte about the first lathe he bought out of a bankruptcy auction in Anderson, and about having Monte at the house for steaks. He talked to the mower dealer guys, who looked at their shoes. He said “my own son” four times. I counted.
Monte waited him out. When Dad ran down, Monte picked the assignment up and held it out to me with a pen.
“Here’s where we are,” he said. “The bank funds Monday or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, your dad’s got no partner and no expansion, and that’s on you. Sign the consent, and you people can fight about the paperwork at Thanksgiving.”
I didn’t take the pen.
I opened the accordion file to the back pocket and took out Dad’s renewal. The landlord’s copy, the one he signed last fall at Krista’s desk, yellow tabs still on it.
Paragraph fourteen. I’d read it four times the night it came back.
“Tenant shall not assign this lease or sublet the premises, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of Landlord, which Landlord may withhold in its sole discretion.”
I laid it on top of Monte’s folder.
“I don’t consent,” I said.
“Alyssa,” Monte said.
“Dad’s lease runs nine more years. It stays in his name. Nobody else gets it.”
Monte let out one breath through his nose. “You’re going to blow up your own father’s deal over a technicality.”
“It’s my building.”
Dad opened his mouth to say whose building it was, and then shut it.
Celeste put the cake knife down on the workbench.
“Leon,” she said. “Give me your glasses.”
He handed them over. She read paragraph fourteen. Then she read the guarantor page, her lips moving a little, the way they do when she balances the checkbook at the kitchen table. Then she gave the glasses back.
“She’s right,” Celeste said. “You’d be paying his rent.”
“I know what it says.”
“You don’t. You never do.” She looked at Monte. “I think you should take your folder.”
Monte looked at Jordan. Jordan was already looking at the bay door.
“The laundromat,” I said to Dad. “It’s yours if you want it. Same rate per foot you pay now. Knock the wall out yourself.”
The contractor’s number was still on my fridge. I didn’t mention it.
Monte put the folder under his arm and didn’t shake anybody’s hand on the way out. Jordan went with him, and nobody said a word about it. They walked out under the banner and past my truck, and Jordan got in Monte’s pickup on the passenger side.
The memo line
Three Saturdays later I parked out front again. Window down this time. Lunch was ten bucks a plate and Dad paid for his.
There’s a hole in the laundromat wall now, about the size of a door, with a tarp over it. He’s doing it himself on Sundays with a rented saw. Celeste sweeps up the brick.
Jordan hasn’t been to Sunday dinner. Dad doesn’t say his name around me, and I don’t ask.
October’s rent came into Krista’s office on the first. The memo line has been blank on twenty-four checks. This one said A.S.
I was handing him a plate of carnitas when a guy rolled a riding mower up the ramp with a dead battery. Dad wrote the ticket out on the workbench. The guy nodded at me.
“Your girl?”
“That’s Alyssa,” Dad said. “My youngest.”
I waited for the rest of it.
He tore the ticket off the pad and handed it over.
“She owns the building,” he said. “Battery’s eighty bucks. Thursday.”
If somebody in your family still introduces you by the smallest thing you do, send this to them. Or save it for Thanksgiving.
Family assumptions can unravel fast when property and paperwork enter the picture – there’s more family land drama and a tense bank-signature showdown worth a read.
