Thursday, I got dressed up, drove downtown, walked into that office, and sat down across from Bertram Fiore, who is eighty-one and still goes in three days a week.
He did our closing in 1984 and the deed in 2022. He is the only lawyer Harold ever used.
He had my folder on his desk before I sat down and did not look surprised about any of it.
Here is what I signed three years ago.
I deeded that house to my son and his wife. That is done and I have never tried to take it back.
What is also on that deed is a life estate reserved to me. The house is theirs and the living in it is mine as long as I am alive, and nobody can sell it out from under me or put me out of that suite.
I did not ask for that. I did not know enough to ask.
Bertram would not draw the deed without it. He told me why in 2022, and I cried and signed and put the folder in my dresser and did not mention it to one soul for three years, because I did not want it hanging over that marriage.
He had a paper in the file. Harold sat in that same office in 1998, dictated it, signed it, and it has been in a folder ever since.
If Dorothy ever comes in here to sign anything about that house, you will not let her do it without a life estate, and you will not let her talk you out of it, and she will try. She gives things away. That is the best thing about her and it is going to cost her one day if somebody does not put it in writing first.
Twenty-seven years that has sat in a file cabinet on Silver Springs Boulevard.
Here is what I did not do.
I did not send a lawyer’s letter and I did not put anything online. I asked my son and his wife to the suite Sunday, no lawyer in the room, told them the house cannot be listed and why, and let Amber read the deed herself.
She did not say anything for a long time. My son finally opened his mouth, three years late, and what he said was to his wife, not to me.
I am moving in April. I decided that in January and it has nothing to do with any of this.
My sister is in Leesburg, she is seventy-nine, and neither of us should be alone. There is a little place four doors down from her.
I am releasing the life estate when I go, at closing, for a number Bertram came up with, and that money goes into the place in Leesburg.
My son is driving the truck. He asked to.
Amber has not apologized and I do not expect it. She came out in February with a box and helped me wrap my dishes and neither of us said a word about anything, and I am counting that.
She called me a buzzard circling this family. My husband knew what I was twenty-seven years ago, and he did not trust me to protect myself, so he went downtown and had a lawyer write it down.