I read the letter in the lobby of the law office, in the chair beside my son, and I read it as I had read ten thousand instruments in the clerk office of Jefferson County: from the bottom up. The title company in Little Rock confirmed the recording of a general warranty deed. The grantor was myself. The grantee was a man named Marcus Dell. The notary stamp belonged to an office in Pine Bluff that I knew very well. And the transfer would become final, the letter said, in three days.
Three days. I folded the letter along its crease and did not say a word to Grant. I turned in my chair and looked at my son, a grown man of fifty one with his father jaw and his father stubborn forehead, and I saw that he was not angry, as I had expected. He was frightened. His face was the face of a child who has just realized he has been holding a hot coal. I took his hand. “Andrea is ready to see us now,” I said. “You are going to tell her everything you know.”
He did. In the glass walled conference room of Andrea, with a legal pad between them, my son told the story in order. Marcus Dell was an old friend from high school who had come to him in September with an idea. A refinancing, he called it, a quick way to put the money of the house of his mother to work. All it needed, he said, was her signature on a few forms. They had come in a stack with the Medicare renewals, and Grant had carried them to me, believing he was helping.
The Medicare papers were real. Buried in the stack were three pages that were not. I had signed them in my own hand at my own kitchen table, because my son had brought them and had stood beside me and said it was routine. A deed. A notary acknowledgment. A paper that waived the usual waiting period. I had read the first and last pages of the stack, as one does with something that comes from a child. I had not read the middle.
Trust given to a child is the most natural thing in the world, and it is the one thing no honest child ever asks a parent to risk.
Andrea was as calm as a surgeon. She said there was time, and that we were fortunate to have come in with days left. She explained that a deed procured by fraud, or by misrepresentation of its nature, can be set aside by a court, and that the title company would stop the closing on receiving proof. She drafted an affidavit for me on the spot. She called the county recorder and filed a notice that the deed was disputed. And she wrote a letter to the title company by hand and had it carried across the street to the courier.
I knew the recorder, a woman named Pat who had trained under me in 1998. She picked up the phone herself. I said, “Pat, I need a hold on an instrument,” and she said, “Done, Mrs. Jefferson. Whoever did this picked the wrong woman.” By Thursday morning the deed carried a mark that I had put on a thousand other pages, a red stamp that read Disputed, Pending. I was prouder of that stamp than I should admit.
The notary, it turned out, had not asked to see my identification. The state commission suspended her pending review, and the attorney general office received a letter from Andrea. Marcus Dell was found in a motel in Hot Springs with eleven other pieces of paper just like mine, each with the name of a widow or a widower and a different address in three counties. A detective in Little Rock, a tall man with a soft voice, told me I was the first victim to have caught him in time.
Grant did not wait to be asked. On the Monday after, he walked into the detective office and gave a full statement. He had been used, he said, and he had been foolish. Marcus had promised him a share of the profits and a new truck. He had wanted, in his heart, to be the son who took care of things. A prosecutor reviewed his statement and his cooperation and offered him a plea to a lesser charge, with probation and a hundred and fifty hours of service. Marcus Dell was charged with eleven counts of fraud.
I wrote a new testament that same week, in the office of Andrea, in the very chair where I had sat in November. I named my daughter Lisa and the trust department of the local bank as co executors, and I named Grant as the beneficiary of a share held in trust. I read every line of it twice, aloud, with my reading glasses on. When I put down the fountain pen of Clarence, which I used to sign it, my hand did not shake. It was the first document I had signed that autumn that I understood completely.
Grant came to the house on Christmas Eve with a small pine wreath he had made himself. He stood on the porch and asked if he could come in. I said that a son did not need permission. He sat at the kitchen table and told me what he had learned, which was that being responsible did not mean being in charge. It meant being honest. I said that was the finest thing he had ever said, and that his father would have written it down.
On the first Sunday of the new year we had the whole family to dinner. Lisa carved the turkey. Courtney brought the pie and did not say a word about forms. The grandchildren sat on either side of me, and my sister from Monticello told the story of the Thanksgiving to anyone who would listen, to great applause. When the pie was cut, Grant tapped his glass with a spoon, and the whole table fell silent. He stood and said, “I would like to thank my mother, who read the middle pages.”