The name on the lis pendens was Coastal Bend Equity Partners.
A lender. Not a relative, not a neighbor, not a lawyer. A company that makes high-interest advances against what it calls anticipated inheritances, and it had been paid for. Irma had signed a contract in April, three weeks before Mom died, borrowing sixty thousand dollars against her expected half of the house on Ocean Drive.
She had told them there was no will. She had told them she and her sister would split the estate. She had not told them about the deed, because she did not know about the deed, and because she had not asked Mom a single question about the house in six years.
Dinah read the filing aloud. Irma stood very still with a cookie platter in her hands. Then she set it down on Moms kitchen counter and looked at me.
She did not argue. She did not say a word about her half. She said, Jo, I borrowed money against Mom. I did not think she would die so soon. And then I could not undo it. I thought if I sold the house, I could pay it all back before anyone knew.
I looked at my sister, and I saw a woman who had been drowning in a debt for a year and who had decided that the only way out was through our mothers front door.
I did not forgive her at once. I said what was true. I said, You changed the locks, Irma. I slept in my own house with no medicine for two days.
She said, I know. I said, You had an estate company carry out Moms dining set. She said, I know. She said it each time, and it did not get easier.
Mama had told me not to open the hatbox unless I had to, and she was right, because the only thing worse than the paper was the sister who needed to see it.
The deed was absolute. A Lady Bird deed passes the property to the named beneficiary when the owner dies, outside probate, and any lien that the other child tried to place on the house is void against it. The lender had no claim against the property. They had a claim against Irma, and they would have to collect it from her.
I went to the Nueces County Clerk the following Monday and filed the paperwork to confirm my title. The lender withdrew the lis pendens two weeks later after a single letter from an attorney. Dinah took the sign down herself and apologized for the mix-up. The dining set came back on a truck, on Irmas dime. Hank carried it in.
The loan was another matter. I did not pay it. It was not mine. But Irma could not pay it either, and I thought about that for a long time. A woman who is seventy-nine and living on a pension in Houston does not simply write a check for sixty thousand dollars.
It was Mom who solved it. In the bottom of the pink hatbox, under the tissue paper, there was a second envelope that I had not noticed. It was addressed, in her shaky hand, to Irma. It said, Irma, mija, the house is Jos because she stayed. But you are my firstborn, and I love you. Here is my mothers pearl necklace, and here is a letter for a man I know at the credit union.
The pearls were appraised at nineteen thousand dollars. The letter was a note of introduction to a lender who offered Irma a legitimate loan at a fair rate to pay off the predatory one. Irma sat in my kitchen and read it three times.
She comes to the house on Sundays now, with a casserole. She does not have a key. I do not make her knock. I leave the door open, and the pink hatbox sits on the shelf in the front hall, empty, with the lid off.