Part 3 — The Title Office
The last message from Mr. T filled the sanctuary screen in letters three feet high.
“Lot is sold, Gerald. Pat never has to know. Bring the paperwork to Thibodeaux Title on Johnston Street, Tuesday at ten.”
It was Sunday. The closing was in forty-eight hours.
Gerald dropped the clicker. It clattered on the floor of the booth, and four hundred people heard it.
Pastor Marcus did not hesitate. He turned to a deacon in the second row, a tall gentle man named Mr. Broussard, and asked quietly if he could be of help. Mr. Broussard, as it happened, practiced property law in Lafayette for thirty years.
He took my arm after the benediction and asked me three questions in the vestibule. Was the lot Daddys? Had it come to me by will? Had I signed anything?
My answers were yes, yes and no.
In Louisiana, what comes to you by inheritance stays yours alone, and a husband cannot sell it without his wifes own signature.
On Tuesday morning at ten, Mr. Broussard and I walked into the title office on Johnston Street before Gerald arrived. The closing agent, a young woman in a gray blazer, listened to us for ten minutes. Then she called the buyers lawyer and cancelled the sale herself.
Gerald came through the door at ten-fifteen with his folder under his arm. He saw me sitting at the table and stopped as if he had run into glass.
He did not shout. He sat down across from me and said he had no excuse.
I told him what I had decided over the weekend. The lot stayed mine. The household accounts would be separated by a legal agreement, so that nothing he did could reach what Mama and Daddy had left me. And he would go with me to the group that met on Wednesday nights in the basement of the church.
He nodded. His eyes were red.
The piano I found myself. A piano tuner in Breaux Bridge named Mr. Fontenot had bought it, and the moment I walked into his shop I saw the four dents in the carpet matched the feet.
He said he had known something was wrong when two men sold him a Baldwin with a peppermint wrapper still stuck in the keys. He had kept it in tune and in his back room.
I paid him the four thousand dollars, and he waived the tuning fee.
On the first Sunday of Advent, the whole choir came to my house. We stood around the Baldwin in the front room, and Sharon sat down and played the opening chord.
I put a peppermint in my cheek, and we sang Blessed Assurance until the windows fogged.