“…there is a note on your file, Mrs. Haines, from yesterday afternoon,” the clerk said, and she turned her monitor a few degrees so that I could read it. I stood at the counter of the Allen County Treasurer office on Calhoun Street, at five minutes past eight in the morning, in my traveling coat, with a suitcase waiting in the trunk of Gloria car and a cruise ship waiting in Miami. The note was short. Owner daughter called. Requests that owner not be contacted regarding the sale. Will handle all correspondence. It was signed with the initials of a clerk who had gone home for the night.
The clerk was a young woman named Mrs. Delgado, with a long braid and a patient, careful face. She read the note aloud to herself again, and her mouth tightened. She said that she was very sorry, that no such request should ever have been entered without proof of authority, and that she would remove it at once. Then she said, more quietly, that the delinquent amount, with penalties and interest, had grown to eleven thousand two hundred and sixty dollars, and that it could be paid in full, that morning, by cashier check, and the sale would be struck from the list.
I had brought the money. I am a careful woman, and I had gone to my bank the evening before, after leaving Tracy house, and withdrawn it from the savings account Ron and I had built over fifty years of Sunday dinners and secondhand cars. I laid the cashier check on the counter, and Mrs. Delgado stamped it, and printed a receipt with the date and my name. She handed it to me across the counter, and her hand was shaking a little. “Mrs. Haines,” she said, “you are the first person who has come in time.”
A cruise ticket, a note that asks a clerk not to call, and an eleven thousand dollar cashier check that arrived in time.
I walked out into the cold bright morning with the receipt folded in my purse and stood on the sidewalk for a long while, watching the traffic. Then I telephoned Gloria. She answered on the first ring. I said, “Gloria, I am not going on the cruise, and I would like you to forgive me, and I would like you to come over for coffee.” She said she was already in her car. Twenty minutes later she was in my kitchen, my younger sister, a tiny white haired woman in a quilted jacket, with her cheeks pink from the wind.
I told her everything, and she listened, with her hands wrapped around the mug. When I reached the part about the email from Hoosier Home Buyers, she put the mug down with a thud. “That little snake,” she said, “that Kyle,” and for a moment I thought she meant my nephew, until she explained that the Kyle of the email was a man who had cheated half the widows in Allen County out of their homes. Gloria had read about him in the Journal Gazette. He had been sued twice. “Tracy fell in with the wrong sort of fellow,” she said.
Tracy came home from work at half past five. I was sitting in the living room, in Ron blue chair, with the tax receipt on the coffee table and a plate of ginger cookies. She stopped in the doorway with her purse over her shoulder. She was forty nine years old, thin and tired, in the navy blazer she wore to the insurance office, and she looked at the receipt, and at me, and her shoulders dropped, slowly, like a sail losing wind. She said, “Mom, you did not go.”
I said no. I patted the seat beside me. She sat, stiffly, on the sofa, and I told her that I had read the letter and the email, and that I knew about Kyle, and the forty thousand dollars. I did not shout. I told her I had been thinking all night about the little girl who had crawled into my lap during thunderstorms, and that I could not make the two women the same person in my mind. “Tell me what happened,” I said. “Tell me all of it. I will listen.”
She wept. She said her divorce had left her with almost nothing, that she had taken out a loan to pay her lawyer, and another to pay the first, and that she had begun to use the property tax money to keep up with the payments. She had meant to replace it. Every April, she had said to herself, next year. Then Kyle had approached her at the bank with a plan: the house would be sold at the tax auction, she would receive a cut, and I would be moved into a lovely senior apartment. She had known how it would look. She had not been able to stop herself.
We made a plan, the three of us, at my kitchen table, with a pot of tea. Tracy would return the fraudulent paperwork to the county attorney, and cooperate in his investigation of Hoosier Home Buyers. She would find a second job, and repay me five hundred dollars every month. She would see a counselor at the church. In return, she would stay on in the house, and I would hold the deed. She agreed to all of it, and signed in her own hand. When she had finished, she looked at Gloria and said, “Aunt Gloria, I am sorry I ruined your trip.”
Gloria snorted. “Honey, you did not ruin anything,” she said. “The cruise runs again in March.” And so it did. In March, with Tracy overtime money and a discount coupon from the senior center, my sister and I boarded a ship in Miami in sensible shoes and straw hats. We stood on the top deck at dusk, with the blue water dissolving into a pink sky, and Gloria took my hand. Behind us, on the other side of the world, in a white two story house on Maple Street, a young woman was watering the garden, waiting for us to come home.