“…to my grandson Kevin Andrew Marsh,” I read aloud in the cold attic, the flashlight shaking in my hand, and the words seemed to hang in the dusty air. I turned the page. There it was, in Kevin neat printing, over my own signature, which I had made without my glasses at the kitchen table on Tuesday. A quitclaim deed. My stone cottage, my herb garden, the cherry tree Gordon had planted in 1981. All of it, signed away to a boy of twenty seven, on a form he had called insurance stuff.
Pepper rubbed my ankle and gave a worried little chirp, the way she did when the weather turned, and I was grateful for her warm weight against my slipper. I sat down on an old trunk, in my nightgown and slippers, and I did what I had done for thirty nine years in courtrooms when something terrible was said. I took a breath, and kept my face calm, and let the words run through me like a record. Then I read the notice from the bank in Charlotte once again. Ninety thousand dollars, drawn in Gordon name, with a signature that was not his. Past due since August. It was addressed to our house, and Kevin had been taking the mail.
I went down the attic stairs one at a time. At the kitchen table, I laid out the evidence in rows, the way I used to lay out exhibits. The ribbon. The letters. The deed. Gordon note. I found my reading glasses, and put them on, and I read it all again. Gordon had been right about everything. Call Mr. Haskell first. I looked at the clock. It was ten past one in the morning. I picked up the telephone anyway and dialed a number I had not used since the memorial reception.
A typewriter ribbon read backward, a note about a lawyer, and a deed signed without glasses.
Harold Haskell answered on the fifth ring, in the rough, sleepy voice of an old lawyer woken from sleep. He had been Gordon friend from the Rotary club for thirty years, a retired probate attorney with a hearing aid and a cat. I told him who I was. I told him about the ribbon. For a moment he said nothing at all. Then he said, “Evie, I have been waiting four months for this call. Gordon came to see me in June. He told me exactly what you would find.”
He asked me to come to his office at nine. He told me not to confront Kevin, not to hide anything, and not to sleep in the house if I felt afraid. I was not afraid, I told him, but I would be careful. I went back to bed with the deed under my pillow and Pepper on my feet. In the morning I made Kevin his favorite French toast. He came down in his socks, rubbing his eyes, and said, “Grandma, you are up early.” I said, “Old women do not sleep much.”
At nine, I sat in Harold Haskell office, a cluttered room with law books to the ceiling. He had already made three calls. The notary who had stamped the deed was a woman I knew from the library, named Sandra, and she had admitted, quickly, that Kevin had told her I was feeble and had asked her to hurry. The bank in Charlotte had agreed to freeze the credit line. And the county recorder had not yet filed the deed, because Kevin had missed the cutoff on Friday. Harold said, “It is not too late, Evie.”
He had also prepared a document of his own. A power of attorney, naming him and my daughter in Raleigh, so that nobody could ever again put paper in front of me without a witness. I signed it with my glasses on, slowly, reading every word aloud. Harold watched with his eyebrows high. When I finished he said, softly, “Gordon would have said you were insufferable.” I said, “Gordon would have said that to my face, and then kissed me.” We both laughed, and then we both had to blow our noses.
That evening I invited Kevin to sit at the kitchen table. I put the Smith-Corona between us. I did not shout. I took out the ribbon, in its little spool, and laid it on the table. I said, “Kevin, your grandfather left me a message. It took me four months and a magnifying glass to read it.” I read it to him, in my courtroom voice, word by word. I watched him go pale. Then I laid the deed beside it, with a pen, and said, “Now you are going to tell me why.”
He wept, openly, with his big hands over his face, the way he had as a small boy at the county fair. He said he had owed money to people in Greenville. He said he had meant to pay it back from the sale of the house, and then to buy me a nice condo, and that he had not thought of it as stealing. He said, “Grandma, I thought you would never know.” I said, “I spent thirty nine years writing down what people said when they thought no one was listening. You are not as clever as you imagine, and neither was I at twenty seven.”
The matter was settled quietly, without the police, on Harold advice, and on my one condition. Kevin would move out, enter a treatment program in Hendersonville, and repay every cent of the credit line over ten years. He did enter the program. He is, I am told, doing well, and last Christmas he sent a card with a picture of a cherry tree, and one plain line, in a steady hand, that said thank you for reading me. As for the Smith-Corona, I keep it on the kitchen table now, with a fresh ribbon and a ream of paper. I type Gordon a letter every Sunday, and I do not mail them. I simply read them aloud, to the cat.