“The man she owes money to,” my mother said from the glowing screen, “is the same man who sold your daddy that boat in 1994. His name is Lenny Boudreaux. He lends to people who cannot go to a bank. He has done it for years. Your sister owes him sixty one thousand dollars, and I think he has a very good idea of what this family owns.” She looked straight into the camera. “Bernice, I want you to listen. Do not hate your sister. She is frightened. But do not let her take what is not hers. Now go on and watch the next one.”
Kayla and I watched all of them that night, at my kitchen table, with a pot of coffee going cold. There were forty one videos, each between two and eight minutes long, and they ran from February of the year before to the week before Mama died. In some she was cheerful. She showed us the squash she had picked. She sang an old song in French. In others she spoke slowly, in the voice of someone doing hard arithmetic. She named the day, the hour, and the people in the room. She had been, I realized, preparing a deposition.
The twentieth video was the one that made me put my head down on the table. It had been recorded in May, in the hospital in Houma, on the afternoon of May 14th. Mama lay propped on three pillows, pale as paper, with a tube in her arm and the date written on a whiteboard behind her. “It is the fourteenth,” she said. “Darlene is here with a man in a suit. They are telling me to sign. I told them no. I told them I will not sign anything in this bed. The nurse is standing in the hall. She heard me.”
A mother who has seen everything may still leave behind the one thing that can heal what she could not prevent: a hand held out with no demand.
We took the tablet to Mr. Landry on Tuesday. He had been the lawyer of Mama for thirty years, a quiet, bow tied man with an office over the pharmacy on Barrow Street. He watched the first video, then the twentieth, and then he took off his glasses and said, “Mrs. Thibodeaux, I drew up the real will in 2022. It is in my safe. It names you as the heir to the house, and it leaves your sister a smaller share. The document your sister read in the church hall is a forgery. I would stake my license on it.”
The notary who had signed the paper of Darlene turned out to be a man named Ronald Pitre, a cousin of Ron the loan shark, who had stamped the document in a parking lot in Baton Rouge. The date on it was May 14th. The register of Terrebonne General showed that my mother had been in the intensive care unit that day, with a fever of 103. A nurse named Charlene remembered, and swore to it. “Miss Odile told them she would not sign,” she said. “They stayed three hours. I called security.”
The hardest part was Darlene. On Thursday evening I drove to Baton Rouge, to the gated subdivision, with the tablet in my purse. She opened the door in a silk robe and looked at me with the cold face she had worn all our lives, and then she saw the thing in my hand, and the face crumpled. She sat on a white sofa in a white living room and watched the video of the phone call on the kitchen tablet. When it ended she did not say a word. She just began to shake.
“I owe him sixty one thousand dollars,” she said finally, in a voice I did not know. “I started with a little. A few hundred, for the casino in Lake Charles. Then it was a few thousand. Then it was everything. Bernice, I did not know how to stop. I thought if I just had the money of Mama, I could pay it off and no one would ever know.” She put her face in her hands. “I am so ashamed. I forged the signature of our mother. I stood in that church and read a lie while she lay in the ground.”
I sat down beside her. It surprised me that I did. I thought of the videos, and of the voice of Mama saying do not hate your sister, and I put an arm around her shoulders. She smelled like perfume and fear. The last video, the forty first, was one I had not yet shown her. I found it in the tablet, and I played it for her on the white sofa. It was recorded in the kitchen on the Sunday before Mama died. She wore her blue housecoat, and she had put on lipstick.
“Darlene,” Mama said, softly, to the camera. “If you are watching, I know what you did, and I forgive you. I am your mother. I always will be. I have changed my will, and I want you to listen to how. The house goes to your sister, who earned it. But I am leaving you twenty thousand dollars, in a trust with Mr. Landry, to pay a counselor for your debt, not Lenny. And I am leaving you my love. Go to the meetings, baby. Go to the priest. Come home to the bayou.”
Darlene wept on that sofa until two in the morning. In the end she signed a statement for Mr. Landry, and the court in Terrebonne Parish set aside the forged will within a month. Lenny Boudreaux was charged with usury and extortion by the state. The trust paid a licensed credit counselor, and for the first time in her life my sister went to meetings in the basement of a church, folding chairs and bad coffee. She has been clean of the casino for sixteen months. She sends me a text every Sunday night: Still here.