“…a power of attorney, a car title transfer, and a lien against the cabin, all bearing your name,” Sharon said in a whisper, and she laid three papers on the counter of the title office on Main Street. It was closing time. The other clerks had gone home. I stood in my good wool coat with my purse over my arm and read the signatures, one after another. They were poor copies of mine. Each had been notarized by Sharon Lutz, a woman who had sat in my church circle for twenty years. She was sixty seven, a widow, and she was weeping so silently that the tears were falling on the paper.
She told me everything while the setting sun came through the dusty blinds. Darren had first come to her in the spring, with a request she had not questioned: a small paper for his mother in law, who was traveling, who had asked him to handle a few things. Then another. Each time he arrived with the signature already on the page, saying I had signed at home. Each time, Sharon stamped it. She said she had told herself I had asked him to. She had not wanted to doubt a young man who brought donuts to the office every Friday.
I did not scream. I have never been a woman who screams. I sat down on the visitor bench and asked her one question. Did she know why Darren needed all of this? Sharon shook her head. But she had heard him talking on the telephone in the parking lot, three weeks earlier, about a fund, and a partner named Rick, and a deadline at the end of the month. He had said, “It is just paper. She will never notice.” Sharon had written the words on a sticky note that evening, and she took the note out of her purse and handed it to me.
A page of whiter paper in a refinance packet, a notary stamp used too often, and a nine year old with a sunfish.
I took the three papers, the sticky note, and the unsigned quitclaim deed from my kitchen table to an attorney named Ms. Brandt, whose office was above a flower shop on Washington Street. She was a woman of sixty, brisk and dry, and she read every page twice. At the end she took off her glasses and said, “Mrs. Ostrowski, you have done exactly the right thing by not signing.” She called a friend at the district attorney office. By the next morning, the title office had agreed to cooperate fully, and Sharon had given a statement.
Kristen called at nine that evening. I had expected her to. She sounded breathless and cheerful, the way she did when she was nervous. She asked whether I had signed the papers. I said I had not. There was a silence on the line. Then she said, in a voice I did not recognize, “Mom, you do not understand.” I told her that I understood very well, and that I would like her to come to the cabin on Saturday, alone, and that we would talk on the dock, where her father used to fish.
The lake was gray and still on Saturday, with a thin mist rising from the water. Kristen arrived in her silver minivan at ten. She was wearing her work blazer, as though she had come from a meeting. She walked down the pier slowly, hugging her arms against the cold, and she stopped a few feet from me. I handed her a thermos of coffee. She took it without a word. Then she began to weep, in great ragged gasps, a forty eight year old woman with her mascara running, and I did what any mother would do.
She said that Darren had been losing money for three years in a scheme with a partner, and that she had not known how bad it was until the spring. He had told her that the cabin was the only thing that could save them. She had said no. He had said she was being selfish. He had taken the refinance packet from her briefcase, slipped in the deed, and she had carried it to my house without reading it. She had known, somewhere, in the back of her mind. She said, “I did not want to know.”
I let the lake wind blow between us for a while. Then I told her what I would do. I would not file charges against her, because she had not drafted the deed. But Darren was another matter, and Ms. Brandt would handle him. The cabin would go into a trust, in Ed memory, naming her two children as the heirs. And Kristen would hand over every account she managed for me, to a financial planner I trusted, and attend counseling, with or without her husband. She agreed. She said, “Mom, thank you for not signing.”
Darren pleaded to forgery and attempted fraud. He was sentenced to eighteen months, suspended, with restitution to two other families he had approached. Sharon surrendered her notary commission and left the title office. She called me once, in January, and I told her that I forgave her. It was an easy thing to say, and a hard thing to mean, and it took me a long time before I meant it. By March, we were sitting beside each other again at the church circle, knitting hats for the hospital nursery.
In May, on the first Saturday of the fishing season, I took my granddaughter Lily out onto Shawano Lake in Ed old aluminum boat. She was nine, with gap teeth and a bright orange life vest. I handed her a rod. I showed her how to bait a hook, the way Ed had taught me in 1984. We sat in the sun, with the small waves slapping against the hull, and she caught a sunfish the size of her palm. She held it up, shrieking with joy. Across the water, Kristen was waving from the dock. I waved back, and I thought, he would have loved this.