“The new owner of the houses,” I said, “is a company called Maddox Realty.” I read the name off the transfer letter on the kitchen table in Amarillo. Lucille stirred her coffee slowly. “Dwight Maddox is the lawyer Royce used for the property. He drew up the papers for T and T in 1981. He has had keys to every one of those houses for forty years.” I laid the letter flat beside the folder and found my hand was steady. Thirty three years at a courthouse records office will do that. I have read a thousand fake signatures and I know the shape of a lie.
I held the signature up to the window. It was nearly right. Royce had a heavy downstroke on the R that I could have picked out of a thousand. This one shook. “That was written by somebody copying,” I told Lucille. “Somebody who has practiced it, but never lost the habit of lifting the pen.” She nodded. “The secretary of Dwight,” she said. “A woman named Pamela. She forged the checks for the property taxes last year. I never reported her because I thought I was being silly.” The two of us looked at each other across the table, two old women in cardigans, ready to start a small war.
“But why did my daughter call you?” I asked. The back door of the house of Lucille opened at that moment, and I turned. A woman stood on the step with a leather briefcase. She was fifty one years old, tall and tired, with the blue eyes of her father and my own stubborn chin. “Mom,” said Karen. “I told you not to come to Amarillo alone. Then I remembered you would not listen.” My daughter closed the door behind her. She did not look ashamed. She looked like a woman who had been carrying something heavy for six months and had finally set it down.
Two women who shared one husband for forty-four years find out who has been trying to take his houses, and it is not who either of them feared.
She sat with us at the kitchen table and told it plainly. Six months earlier, a stranger from Maddox Realty had called her at work, offering to buy her inheritance of “the Teague rental portfolio” for a fraction of its value. Karen had never heard of a rental portfolio. She started digging, and she found the file of T and T Holdings in the desk of her father. “I found out about Lucille, and I was furious with Dad,” Karen said. “For a week I could not eat. Then I realized somebody was moving fast to take everything while we were still mourning. So I called Lucille under a different name, because I wanted to find out whether she was in on it.”
“You thought I was in on it?” Lucille asked. Karen nodded sheepishly. “I thought you might be his accomplice. But Lucille, you cried on the phone and told me about your church wedding. And then you told me about the nights he was away on Saturdays, and how you waited with supper. I knew you were another victim.” I took the hand of my daughter. I took the hand of Lucille. Three women at a kitchen table in Amarillo, holding on to each other with their rings on. If anyone had told me that morning I would be sitting here, I would have called them a liar.
After supper that night, Lucille showed me the guest room, a small yellow room with a quilted bed and a vase of silk zinnias on the dresser. Royce had never slept there, she said, but she had kept it ready for his mother. I lay awake and looked at the ceiling fan turning. It occurred to me that a woman can live forty four years beside a man and never learn his real name. It also occurred to me that I had spent the same years being loved, as clumsily and incompletely as it was, and that the love had been real even if the schedule was not.
Karen opened her briefcase. She had spent six months quietly gathering evidence, the forged letters, the false signatures, the recordings of calls from Pamela and Dwight. She had hired an investigator from Lubbock and paid for him out of her own savings. She had also found a clause in the original deed, one Royce had written in 1981: if anything happened to him, the houses were to be held in a joint trust for his wife, his other wife and his daughter, managed by a neutral trustee. “Dad knew he was wrong, Mom,” Karen said softly. “He just did not know how to fix it. So he built a way for us to find each other.”
We took it all to the district attorney in Potter County the next morning. A deputy investigator, a bright young woman named Sandoval, listened for two hours without blinking. By Friday, Dwight Maddox was being questioned about the fraudulent transfers, and Pamela had given a full statement about the forged checks and signature. The twenty six houses in two cities were frozen under court order. It took seven months, but the trust was finally put in place. Lucille, Karen and I would share the income equally, and a third of it would go to a fund for the foster children of Wichita Falls.
On the drive home I stopped at the cemetery in Wichita Falls, where Royce lay under a plain granite stone, and I sat on the bench beside it with a box of chocolate covered cherries. I did not shout. I did not cry. I told him the truth, that his two wives had become friends, that his daughter had saved his houses and that I forgave him, mostly. Then I ate one of the cherries and left the rest on the stone for the birds. It is a strange kind of peace, I think, to sit beside a liar and know that he was also a good man.
I still do not know how to feel about Royce. Some days I am angry as a hornet. Some days, when I sit on the porch with the two red chairs, I remember the box of chocolate covered cherries and I think that he loved us both in his clumsy, cowardly way. Lucille drives over from Amarillo on Saturdays. We sit on the porch with our feet up, and she calls me her sister, and I let her. Karen comes at supper. We have never talked about who deserved him more. We just pass the cherries.