“…for the closing on Friday, we have your daughter listed as your authorized agent,” the young man at Blue Ridge Title had said, and I held the telephone against my ear in room 412 at Mission Hospital while the hospital social worker, Ms. Boyd, sat at the end of my bed with a legal pad. I asked the young man to repeat himself. He did. Then I asked, as pleasantly as I could manage, whether any document naming Lindsay Pike as my agent had been recorded anywhere in Buncombe County. He paused. He said he would need to check. I said I would wait.
Ms. Boyd was a tall woman in her fifties with a gray braid and a lanyard covered in tiny enamel pins. She had been a social worker for twenty nine years, and she wrote every word I said without raising an eyebrow. When the young man returned to the telephone, he said that the file contained a scanned power of attorney, notarized on October ninth. I had been in an ambulance on October ninth. I told him so. I asked him to cancel the closing immediately, in writing, and to hold every document in the file for the sheriff.
He stammered that he would need a supervisor. A supervisor came on, a woman with a firm voice, and I told her the same story. She said that her office had followed ordinary procedures, and that she would be glad to cooperate. Ms. Boyd leaned toward the telephone and gave her name, her title, and her direct line. Then she said, mildly, that the hospital legal office would be in touch within the hour. The supervisor stopped sounding firm. Within ten minutes, an email arrived confirming that the closing had been suspended pending investigation. I remember thinking that a person can be flat on her back in a hospital bed and still be the one holding the door shut, if only she remembers to read what is put in front of her.
One misspelled middle name, a deed disguised as a form, and a hospital social worker with a legal pad.
The hospital attorney, Mr. Ferrell, came to my room that afternoon, in a gray suit, with a briefcase and a calm manner. He helped me sign a proper power of attorney, naming my nephew Daniel in Charlotte, and a revocation of any other. He arranged for a notary of the hospital own, a retired nurse named Mrs. Adair who took my fingerprint and examined my identification and asked me three questions about the day of the week. At the end she smiled and said, “You are as clear as a bell, Mrs. Pike.” She stamped the paper. I wept a little, from relief.
Lindsay returned on Friday morning, as she had promised, in a cream blazer, with a bouquet of grocery store carnations. She walked into room 412 smiling and stopped at the sight of Mr. Ferrell, Ms. Boyd, and Daniel, who had driven up from Charlotte that dawn. Her smile held for a moment, and then it fell apart. She sat down in the chair by the window and put the flowers on her knees and said, in a faint, childish voice, “Carol, I can explain.” I said that I hoped she would.
She had lost her husband job two years earlier, she said, and they had borrowed against their house, and then against their credit cards, and then from a man who did not mind how the money was repaid. She had sat in her car for three weeks working up the courage to tell me. Then I fell on the steps, and she saw the broken hip as a door that had opened. A buyer had offered three hundred and ten thousand dollars in cash. She had thought she could sell the house, and tell me afterward, and buy me a nicer one.
“A nicer one,” I repeated. “With what money, Lindsay?” She had no answer. I looked at her, at the thin face and the careful makeup, and I thought of the fourteen year old girl who had refused to say the word mother and who had finally, at her wedding, put her arm around my waist for a photograph and said, “Thank you for coming, Carol.” I had treasured that sentence for twenty years. I treasured it still. I said, “Sit down, honey. Let us work out what you really need.”
What she needed was not what she had asked for. Mr. Ferrell referred her to a financial counselor at the credit union, and to a lawyer who specialized in debt. Daniel and I agreed that I would not press charges, but that the deed, the false notary stamp, and the forged power of attorney would be held in a sealed file at the hospital legal office, so that if she ever tried again the consequences would arrive. The notary, Debbie, lost her commission. Blue Ridge Title was reported to the state board and issued a written apology.
I spent six weeks in rehabilitation, learning to walk again between two parallel bars, with a physical therapist named Tomas who called me Miss Carol and made me sing hymns to keep my breathing steady. Lindsay came every Tuesday and Friday, alone at first, then with her two boys, Wyatt and Eli, who brought me crayon drawings of the stone house with a stick figure in the window. She never mentioned the deed. She sat by my bed, and she read me the newspaper, and she brushed my hair.
On the day I went home, in January, Lindsay drove me up the winding road to Sunset Drive. She helped me up the front steps one at a time, with her hand under my elbow. At the door, she stopped. She said, “Carol, may I ask you something?” I nodded. She took a breath and said, in a very small voice, “Would it be all right if I called you Mama Carol?” I could not answer. I put my hand against her cheek, and the boys, behind her, began to cheer for no reason at all.