The framed deed on the wall of the lake house had a notary stamp in the corner, and when I held my telephone to the photograph of my daughter in law and made it larger, I could read the name of the company that had owned the mortgage. I am Loretta Gaines, seventy six years old, of Columbia, Missouri, and I sat at my kitchen table in my church dress with a pecan pie in the refrigerator and the voice of Leon Mabry still in my ear. “Loretta,” Leon had said, “the account in Osage Beach is called Gaines Lake Holdings. I think you had better come in on Friday.”
On Friday morning I sat in the glass office of Leon at the bank on Providence Road with a cup of bad coffee and a folder of statements. Forty eight wire transfers, each one of twenty six hundred dollars. The account had been opened with the signature of my husband Harold, dated six weeks after he passed. Harold had signed his name with a flat looping H for thirty four years of mail routes. This H had a little hook on the end. Leon laid a copy of the identification from the file beside it, and the face on the card belonged to Warren Pell, the father of Brittany.
There was more. The same account had paid the mortgage on the lake house, then a boat loan, a condominium in Gulf Shores, and a credit card with the name of my son on it. The life insurance of Harold, the policy that nobody in the family knew about, had been found by someone. Only one person had helped me fill out the paper after the service. Kevin had sat beside me at the kitchen table, so patient, and had even licked the stamps. I folded the statements and thanked Leon and asked him for one small favor.
A framed deed seen in a photograph gave one widow the length of a holiday weekend to bring her son back to the truth in Columbia.
I gave my terms on Saturday morning, on the new dock at the lake house, with a sheriff deputy from Camden County standing politely at the end of it and Leon Mabry beside me with his hat in his hands. Kevin had come out of the house in his bathrobe, with the carving knife still on the counter behind him. “Kevin, I have the statements. I want no shouting. You will tell me about Gaines Lake Holdings, and about Mr. Pell, and about why the name of your father is on a paper he never saw. Then we will decide what a mother is willing to forgive.”
Kevin leaned on the railing of the dock with his hands shaking. “Mom, it was the idea of the father of Brittany,” he said. “I told him about the insurance policy in the safe, the one Dad kept. He said we could invest it. He opened the account in the name of Dad, because the insurance company would not release the money without it. Then came the house payment, and the boat, and I thought, well, Mom has plenty. I was in debt for the dealership, the school for the kids, everything. I told myself you did not need it.” His voice cracked. “You were never fine. I knew it.”
But a man in a bathrobe has one last instinct, and it is to hide. Kevin spun around, ran up the dock, burst through the sliding door of the lake house, and snatched the framed deed from the wall by the fireplace, with the folder of bank papers from the mantel, meaning to throw them into the fire that Brittany had left burning. The glass of the frame cracked against the stone. Brittany screamed. The dog barked. And a pair of heavy boots pounded across the deck behind him.
Kevin stopped in front of the fireplace with the cracked frame in his arms, the deputy filling the doorway behind him, Leon Mabry panting on the deck, and Warren Pell standing by the window with the color draining from his tan. The deputy spoke in the slow voice of a man who had stopped a hundred kitchen fights. “Son, put that down. You are not burning anything in this house today.” Kevin looked at his wife, who had her hands over her mouth. He looked at me, standing small on the deck with my pocketbook. He set the frame on the hearth and sat down on the floor.
The consequences were long, and they were fair. Warren Pell was charged with forgery and fraud, and the lake house, which had been paid for with my money, was sold by order of the court, and the proceeds came back to me. Kevin sold his boat and his new truck and took a second job, and he signed a paper agreeing to repay every dollar, thirty dollars at a time if he must. Brittany left for her parents in Florida for a month and came back, quiet and thinner, and apologized to me with a pot of soup. I accepted the soup. The rest I am still considering.
In the name of my husband Harold, who passed in 2021, I started the Harold Gaines Fund. It pays for legal help for widows whose accounts or names have been used without their knowledge and for emergency help for the families of retired mail carriers, in Boone, Callaway and Cole counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and twelve widows and recovered over six hundred thousand dollars. One was an eighty year old retired postal clerk from Fulton who held her restored bank card against her chest and said that she had never once asked her children for anything.
On Thanksgiving morning the next year, I stood in my own kitchen in Columbia with a twenty two pound heritage turkey in the oven and a pecan pie cooling on the counter. Kevin carved at the head of my table, and I sat beside him with my good china. Brittany passed the potatoes with a small shy smile. The grandchildren argued over the wishbone. Kevin raised his glass and said, “To Dad.” I raised mine, and I felt the whole family settle around me like soft snow.