Part 3 — The First Widower
Judge Oakes read the last line of the note aloud. “The man in the photograph is Elwood Pruett, of Grand Island. The first one was named Clarence Boyle, of Kearney, Nebraska.” She lowered the page. “Both are alive. I spoke to the nephew of Mr. Boyle by telephone on Thursday. He is ninety-four years old, he lives in a care home in Lincoln, and he has asked after his house in every letter he writes.”
It had been the same each time, the judge said. A woman with a warm smile moves in as a helper after a death, brings a casserole, brings papers, and a house changes hands. In Nebraska, as in Iowa, a deed signed by a person who cannot understand it can be set aside, and a quitclaim obtained by pressure can be undone. Both men had children who had been told to stay away, and both had been moved into care homes where visitors were limited.
Heather had not run. She sat very straight on the folding chair with her sunglasses in her lap, and when she finally spoke, it was in a flat voice. “They were happy,” she said. “I cooked for them. I sat up with them.” “You did,” said the judge. “And then you took their homes. Both things were true. Only one is a crime.”
The sheriff of Wapello County, who had been waiting by the garage with his hat on, stepped onto the grass. He asked Heather to come with him, politely, and she went. Seventy people watched a woman in good sunglasses get into the back of a car without a word. The auctioneer, Dale, switched off the microphone and said, to nobody, “That is the first time in thirty years I have been glad to cancel a sale.”
Kyle sat down on the lawn chair next to mine. He had his phone in his hand, but the screen was dark. He said, “Dad, I signed the quitclaim. I signed it because she put it in front of me and said you were not well.” He had the look of a boy who has finally read the note from school. “I did not read it. Mom was dying and I did not read anything.” I put my hand on his shoulder. It was the first time in a year.
The county moved faster than I would have believed. The quitclaim deed was declared void, because the trust Bernadette and I had made in 2021 held the title and Bernadette had no half to give. The doctor in Des Moines turned out never to have examined me at all, and the letter bearing his name was a forgery on stolen letterhead. The state medical board was informed. The trust, of which I am the only trustee, stood exactly as it had stood.
Heather was charged in Iowa with forgery, exploitation of a dependent adult and attempted theft of the house, and in Nebraska with the same for the two men. She pleaded guilty to all of it in the summer. The sentences ran together, and they were long enough for the judges to feel the matter had been taken seriously. The deeds of the two men were set aside, and Clarence Boyle went home to Kearney in October, in a wheelchair, with his nephew pushing and a banner on the porch.
Judge Oakes drove me out to see him in the winter. He is ninety-four years old and sharp as a tack, and he held my hand for a long time. “I was a conductor,” he said. “Forty-one years on the Union Pacific. I liked to watch people get on the train and thought I could always tell who was lying. I was wrong about one.” I told him I had carried mail for thirty-four years and had been wrong about two, one of them in my own kitchen.
The tablecloth went home with the judge to be washed, mended and pressed. She brought it back on a Saturday in a white box, and I spread it over the table in the dining room where Bernadette and I had eaten fifty Christmas dinners. The border was exactly as she left it, the tiny letters stitched by a woman who knew she was dying and who refused to leave her husband unprotected. I put my finger on the L and the H and kept it there.
Kyle and I did not speak of it for a long time. He started coming for supper on Sundays, and he did the dishes. In April he asked if I could teach him to sort mail, the way it was done on Route 9, by street and by number. I told him it is mostly patience. He said that he could learn patience.
Fifty years of patient stitches say more than a loud voice ever could, and my wife made the loudest sentence of her life with a needle. On Wednesdays Judge Oakes still comes at ten, and the two of us sit in the front room with our pillows and our bobbins, and I am learning, a little clumsily, to make a border of my own.
I am working one line into it, very small, in the corner where nobody will look unless they have to. It says: L.H. LIVES HERE. LOVE, B. Then the thread runs out and I tie it off. Outside the window the garbage truck goes by on Elm Street, and the neighbors wave, and the truck of my son is parked in the driveway where the auction trailer once stood. It is Saturday. Nothing is for sale.