The father of Courtney took the white envelope from my hand and read the name printed in its upper corner with the expression of a man reading his own name in a newspaper. The name was the Office of the Secretary of State, Notary Public Division, and below it, the line, Attention, Roland Teague, Attorney at Law. He tore it open on the marble island. The letter inside said that his official notary seal had been used in connection with a deed of trust in Wake County, dated July the ninth, notarized in his name on a day when he was in Charleston for a conference. I am Gloria Battle, seventy seven years old, and I stood quietly with my hands folded.
Roland Teague was a real estate attorney, sixty years old, a tall courtly man who kept his seal in a locked drawer in his office. I had gone to see him in August, after my accountant called. I had laid my credit report on his desk and told him my story, and he had stared at it, and said nothing, and then he had looked in a drawer of his own, and gone gray. He had told me that his daughter worked in his office on Thursdays. He asked me to give him two weeks to find out the truth himself. I had given him one, and I had not told Michael.
The house had grown quiet. The sorority sisters of Courtney, in their summer dresses, held their mimosas at their sides. One of them murmured something and set hers down on a coaster. Michael stood by the window, white faced, with the credit report in his hand. “Courtney,” Roland said softly, in a voice I will remember all my life, “I found my seal in your purse last week. I thought you had borrowed it for a notary class. I did not think my own child would use it to put her mother in law in debt.”
A white envelope from the state office gave one retired nurse the length of a housewarming to bring her wife of her son back to the truth in Raleigh.
I gave my terms across the marble island, to Michael first. “Son, I love you, and I am not angry at you. I am sorry for you. This is what I ask. The house will be sold. The mortgage will be paid from the proceeds, and anything left over will go to the two of you to start again in a rented apartment. Courtney will go to the bank on Monday with her father and tell the whole truth. If she does that, I will not pursue charges. And the two of you will come to my house in Rocky Mount next Sunday for dinner, with no one else present.”
Courtney sank onto a bar stool and pressed her hands over her face. “Gloria, I grew up in a house where we were afraid of losing everything, and where my mother measured my worth by the car I drove,” she said. “I wanted so badly to be somebody. I thought if I had this house, my mother would finally look at me with pride.” She lifted her eyes, red and blurred. “I forged your name on the papers, and I used the seal of my father, and I told Michael that he had co signed. I have been lying every day for two months. I am so ashamed.”
But the old terror came quick. Courtney sprang from the stool, snatched the credit report off the marble, and ran across the kitchen toward the patio door, plainly meaning to throw it into the pool. She had her hand on the latch when Michael caught her wrist. The tall catering manager, in a black apron, stepped across the patio threshold. Two of the sorority sisters, to their own astonishment, rose from the sofa and linked arms in the doorway. And Roland Teague, with great sadness, put his hand on his shoulder of his daughter and said, “Courtney. No.”
Courtney stopped at the glass door with the credit report in her hand and the afternoon sun on her face. For a moment she seemed about to push through them all. Then she looked at her husband, who was crying without a sound, and at her father, who had never once raised his voice. She turned and laid the papers on the marble island in front of me. “Gloria,” she said, “I am sorry,” and then she did something I did not expect. She came around the island and put her arms around my neck and held on as if she were drowning.
The consequences were fair and even kind. The house sold within a month for a price that paid off the mortgage and left a little over, and Michael and Courtney rented a two bedroom apartment in Raleigh. Courtney went to the bank with her father on Monday and signed a full statement, and the Secretary of State issued a warning rather than a penalty. She worked as a receptionist at a dental office and paid her father back for the legal fees. Every Sunday that fall, the two of them came to Rocky Mount for dinner.
In the name of my mother Mattie, who passed in 1989, I started the Mattie Battle Fund. It pays for nursing assistant training and scholarships for young women who want to enter home health care, and for emergency help for families caring for elders, in Nash, Edgecombe and Wilson counties. In the first year we enrolled forty one students and helped sixty two families. One was a nineteen year old from Tarboro who worked nights as a nursing aide and rode two buses each way, and who held her first certificate in both hands and said it was the proudest piece of paper in her family.
On a bright Sunday in December, I stood at my stove in Rocky Mount, stirring a pot of collard greens, while the smell of ham filled the kitchen. The door opened. Michael came in with a bag of rolls, and behind him, Courtney, carrying a pie that she had baked herself. She set it on the counter and wiped her hands on her apron. “Gloria,” she said shyly, “I learned the recipe from my father.” I took a bite, standing at the stove. It was a little burnt at the edge, and it was perfect, and I told her so.