Part 3 — The Named Spouse
The page Mrs. Brenneman held out to me carried one name, typed in capital letters under the heading Non-Borrowing Spouse. “Darlene Voss,” she read. “Age seventy-one. Relationship, wife. Married February fourteenth of this year, Hancock County.” Renee put both hands over her mouth. Darlene Voss was not a stranger. She was the mother of Kyle, a woman I had met twice, at a baptism and at a funeral, and nobody had ever introduced her to me as my bride.
Mrs. Brenneman told us what the paper meant. A reverse mortgage must name every adult living in the home, and a counselor must certify that each one understands the loan. Someone had needed a second name to make the application look complete, and a wife who could not be questioned was easier to invent than an explanation for why the borrower lived alone. The marriage certificate attached to the application had been printed on an ordinary printer, with the seal of a county that does not exist in Ohio.
Renee found her voice at last. “Dad, I did not know it would be her name. Kyle told me it was a technical form. He put a paper in front of me and I signed where he pointed. I stopped reading when it was easier not to.” “You stopped reading,” I said, “and I stopped counting. That is how a house gets drained, Renee. Two people looking at the floor.”
The branch manager did what a good one should. She had already telephoned the compliance office, and she had also telephoned two deputies of Hancock County, who were waiting by the little coffee bar with their hats in their hands. Kyle looked at the door and then at the deputies, and he sat down, slowly, in the puddle of coffee he had spilled across the marble.
The legal part was plainer than I expected. A loan obtained by fraud can be undone, and the lender was not eager to defend a signature it had never verified. The servicer froze the account, notified the federal housing office, and began the process of rescinding the loan and releasing the lien on my house on Sandusky Street. The paperwork would take a few months, but the direction of it was never in doubt.
Then came the question of the money. Of the $211,000, more than $64,000 was still in the account in the name of Renee, and she signed it back to the lender without being asked. The bass boat, the Polaris and the seventy-five-inch television were seized and sold. The betting application, I learned, had been opened with my own mailing address, which did not help Kyle when the investigators read its records.
Kyle was charged with forgery, identity fraud and theft from an elderly person, and in the spring he pleaded guilty to the first two. The judge ordered him to serve time, to repay what could not be recovered, and to stay away from my house. His mother was interviewed in Fostoria. She said she had signed whatever her son handed her and had never seen the house, and the prosecutor, who had a mother too, recommended a year of probation.
Renee asked to speak to me before her own hearing. She stood in my kitchen, which smelled of burnt toast, and she did not ask for forgiveness. “I held your hand in that hospital every day, Dad,” she said, “and I let my husband hold the pen. I cannot tell you which was the lie.” “Both,” I said. “And both were real. That is what makes it so hard.”
She pleaded to a lesser charge and received probation, repayment and a long course of counseling. She also did something nobody required. Every evening for a year she came to the house on Sandusky Street with a pudding, a real one, and sat with me for an hour while I told her about the road. I did not say that I forgave her. I said the front door would stay unlatched, and she understood what I meant.
In April the lender returned the deed to its proper state, and the lien was cleared. Mrs. Brenneman sent me a copy of Certificate 0417 with the word VOID stamped across the front in red. I framed it and hung it above the table in the kitchen, next to the picture of Bonnie in front of the red Peterbilt.
Forty-one years of honest entries in a logbook turned out to be worth more than every paper my son-in-law could print. I am told that is the sort of sentence people put on a plaque. I will settle for the notebook, which now rests in a drawer, closed at last.
A home health aide named Mrs. Osgood comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, paid by the money that came back, and a real therapist at Blanchard Valley has me walking the length of Main Street with only a cane. On Sunday I let my grandson sit in the cab of the Peterbilt, and he turned the big wheel and made the engine noise with his mouth. I sat in the passenger seat, looked down the street at the house my wife and I paid off in 1998, and logged the day in my head: clear skies, no delays, all well.