“…something was filed this morning,” Mrs. Harris said, and I gripped the telephone so hard that my knuckles cracked. I stood in the hall of my brick bungalow on Holbrook Street, under the photograph of Stella in her wedding dress, with the cord stretched halfway to the kitchen. I asked her what had been filed. I could hear her keys clicking. She said, in a slow, careful voice, “Mr. Kowalski, a quitclaim deed was recorded at nine forty this morning, transferring the property at your address to Bradley J. Simmons. I am so sorry.” I closed my eyes. I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Harris.”
I did not shout. I have spent thirty one years on the assembly line at Dodge Main, and I know what it means when a machine jams. You do not kick it. You stop, and you look, and you find the part that failed. I told Mrs. Harris I would be downtown in an hour. I put on my good coat and my hat, and I drove my old Buick down Joseph Campau, past the bakeries and the Polish bookstore, and across the city to the Coleman Young building, where the Wayne County Register of Deeds keeps its records on the second floor.
Mrs. Harris was a broad, calm Black woman of sixty, with half moon glasses and a cardigan the color of oatmeal. She laid the recorded deed in front of me on the counter. There was my signature, the shaky signature from the Christmas kitchen table. And there, below it, was the thing that had been missing from my copy. A crisp, blue notary stamp. Bryce Dolan, Notary Public, Oakland County. The acknowledgment said that on the twenty second of December, Walter Kowalski had appeared before him, in person, and signed of his own free will.
A recorded deed with a blue notary stamp, a barber with a comb in his pocket, and a bright orange Stingray in April.
“Mrs. Harris,” I said, “I have never in my life met a man named Bryce Dolan.” She nodded slowly. She said that in her experience, a notary who was not present at a signing was committing a serious offense, and that the document, being fraudulently acknowledged, could be challenged and set aside. She said I would need an attorney. She wrote a name and a telephone number on a card. Ms. Ruth Feinberg, an elder law attorney, who had an office six blocks away, and who had, she said, a particular talent for catching men like Brad with their shoes untied.
Ms. Feinberg was a tiny, brisk woman of seventy, with a gray braid, a cane, and the energy of a hummingbird. She read the deed, the Christmas card, and the photocopied title for the Corvette. She asked me three questions. Who had been in the kitchen when I signed? Brad and Karen. Had any stranger been present? No. Had Brad ever mentioned a notary? He said he would take care of that. She smiled very slightly. “Mr. Kowalski,” she said, “your son in law has made two mistakes. He had a notary lie, and he bragged about it to a barber.”
By two o clock she had filed an emergency motion with the circuit court, along with an affidavit from Stan Nowak, who had come downtown in his white barber coat, with his comb still in his pocket. He swore to what he had heard in his shop on Saturday. Ms. Feinberg also arranged for a hold to be placed on the title of the Corvette with the Secretary of State. By the end of the day, the deed to my house had been flagged, and a hearing set for Monday morning. I went home and sat in the dark kitchen, with a cup of coffee and a plate of Stella pierogi from the freezer.
Karen called that night at nine. I had not spoken to her in a week. She was weeping so hard that I could barely understand her. She said Brad had come home that afternoon in a rage, because the bank had called, and a sheriff deputy had come to his office. He had screamed at her. Then, for the first time in twenty years, he had told her the truth. About the Christmas form, the notary, and the plan. She said, “Papa, I did not know. I swear on Mama memory.” I did not point out that a person should not swear on anything.
The hearing lasted twenty minutes. The judge, a stern woman with silver hair, read the file and then looked down at Brad, who sat at the other table in an ill fitting suit, and she said that fraudulent notarization of a real estate transfer from an elderly man was a matter she took very seriously. She voided the deed on the spot. She referred the matter to the prosecutor. And she ordered Brad to have no contact with me, or with the Corvette, until further notice. Bryce Dolan, the notary, was arrested outside the courthouse the following week.
Karen did not go with Brad. She moved back to Hamtramck in January with her two suitcases, and she took the little room over the garage. For a week, we hardly spoke. Then, one night, she knocked on my kitchen door in her bathrobe, with two cups of tea, and she said, in a very small voice, “Papa, I should have seen it.” I said, “You were too busy loving him.” She laid her head on my shoulder. We sat there for a long time, in the yellow light, while the radiator ticked.
On the first warm Saturday in April, I drove the Corvette out of the garage. It was a 1972 Stingray, bright orange, with a black stripe and a little crack in the dashboard that Stella used to hide with a doily. Stan Nowak sat beside me, in his Sunday cap. We rolled down Joseph Campau with the windows open, past the bakery, past the corner bar, past a row of old men on a bench, who rose and saluted. Stan grinned. He said, “Walt, I knew you were not ready for the home.” I laughed, and shifted into third, and gave it some gas.