Part 3 — Circled Twice
The second page was a March square, scorched at one corner but still readable, with a red circle drawn twice around the same line.
“Lu — the bread bag in the freezer, third shelf, in back. Take it out in front of Brandt.”
My son laughed once, a nervous laugh, and said his father had gone soft in the head at the end. I said I had never known Harvey more clear than he was that spring.
Pamela from Maple Court had stopped stacking her forms. She said, kindly, that she would wait.
I walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer. Third shelf, behind the ice trays and a bag of peas, sat a gallon bread bag with a twist tie.
Inside it lay a manila envelope, frosted at the edges, and written on the front in his tiny printing, “For Lucinda only.”
I carried it back to the dining room table and opened it with Brandt watching.
There was a signed will leaving everything to me, a letter from a Delaware lawyer confirming that I was named on the reverse mortgage papers as an eligible spouse, and a counseling certificate with a date stamped March fourteenth.
The letter was explicit. As long as I lived in the house as my main home, kept up the taxes and the insurance, the lender could not call the loan due. I could stay for the rest of my life.
On the bottom of the folder Harvey had written, in the same red pen, “Another year with Lu. Lucky me. Let her stay home.”
Pamela gathered her forms into her tote bag. She said that Maple Court was a lovely place for those who chose it, and she was glad to be told that today it was not my choice.
Brandt put both hands over his face. He said the nine thousand dollars had gone to pay a gambling debt, not to a roof, and he had been too ashamed to say so.
I looked at my only son, who had my husbands nose and my fathers temper, and I did not shout. I told him I would not call the police, and I would not keep his father watch in a drawer. But he would put on a real roof, with his own hands and his own weekends.
He was a roofer by trade, which made it a fair arrangement.
Brandt returned the watch and the car keys that evening. By the next Saturday, he and two of his crew were up on the house in the cold morning sun, and I stood below with a thermos of coffee.
When the last shingle was down, he climbed off the ladder and handed me a brand new calendar, the kind that hangs by the phone.
In the very first square he had written, in his own awkward hand, “Another year with Mom. Lucky me.”