Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the young wife at the table put her hand up, the way a girl does in a classroom.
Her name was Tanya. She was twenty-six. She and her husband had driven over from Brandon with a lenders letter and a hope, and she had been looking at the signature on that page since the title officer unfolded it.
She said, That is my name. I did not know it was your house.
It had been a Tuesday in January at the hospital. Tanya works in patient registration. A woman in a hurry had asked her to step into a room on the third floor and sign a paper as a witness for an elderly lady with a broken wrist. The woman said it was for the doctors. The lady signed with her left hand. Tanya signed too, because it seemed like a small thing, and she was told the notary would come later.
The notary never came. And Tanya had not given it a second thought until she sat down at a closing table and heard the title officer say her name.
I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I said, You were kind to me in that room. You gave me a cup of water. She started to cry.
Greta said she had every intention of getting it notarized. She said she was only trying to look after her aunt. The title officer, whose name was Marguerite and who had not raised her voice once, said that a person trying to look after her aunt does not list her house for sale before the aunt has finished rehab.
Then she picked up the phone and called the nursing home administrator, and she called Adult Protective Services, and she did not apologize for either one.
I had spent nine months thinking a bed was all I had left, and an old pair of pink slippers turned out to be the best place on earth to hide the truth.
Elsie drove me home to Osborne Avenue that afternoon. The key Greta had copied did not work anymore, because she had rekeyed the locks, but a neighbor of fifty years named Mr. Delgado came across the street with a screwdriver and a hardware store receipt and had the door open before I finished crying.
It was exactly as I had left it. Greta had not been able to sell the furniture without the paper. My husbands chair was still in the front room. My Bible was on the kitchen table.
I revoked the power of attorney the next morning. A lawyer from Bay Area Legal Aid, a young man who charged me nothing, drove to the house and drew up a new one, with three witnesses and a notary, and he had it recorded before lunch. Elsie is named as the person who gets a call if anything happens. She did not ask for that.
Adult Protective Services closed its investigation in November. Greta repaid every dollar the home had charged for the rehab stay. A judge denied her petition for guardianship, which she had filed two days before the closing, and she was ordered to stay away from the house. She did not appeal. Wayne called me from Orlando and cried for ten minutes and said he had believed her.
Tanya and her husband did not buy my house. They bought one three doors down. She comes over on Saturdays, and we sit on the porch with sweet tea, and she tells me about her patients and I tell her about the cannery. She calls me Miss Estelle.
I wear the pink slippers every day. One of them has a small ink stain on the inside from a folded photocopy. I do not wash it out.