Then my mother said, “Wade, honey. You can’t sign what isn’t mine to give.”
He laughed. He had that look men get when they’ve already been to the courthouse and think the hard part is behind them.
She went down the hall to her bedroom and came back with a folder, and she did not hand it to him. She handed it to Pastor Ostrander, who was standing there with a paper plate, and asked him to read the first page out loud because her eyes weren’t good under that lamp.
The Hutchins Family Trust. Established September the eleventh, 2016.
She put the store in it nine years ago. The building on Main, the inventory, the business itself, the whole works, deeded over to a trust with her as the sole trustee and the four of us as equal beneficiaries after she’s gone.
Mr. Ellard down at the bank sat with her three separate afternoons to do it. She never told a one of us, because she said it wasn’t anybody’s business until it was.
And here’s the part my brother had not thought through in three years of signatures.
A power of attorney lets an agent act for the person. It does not let him touch what the person doesn’t own. Mama has not personally owned Hutchins Hardware since 2016. What Wade had gotten was her signature on some things that mattered and some things that didn’t, and then he had gone and filed an assumed-name registration with the state, which cost him twenty-five dollars and which means about as much as a library card.
He argued. He said the word legal maybe six times.
Mama let him get all the way to the end of it in front of half the church, and then she said, “Call Mr. Ellard Monday. He’ll explain it kinder than I can.”
Then she turned the folder over. Taped inside the back cover was a note from our daddy, who died in 2011, that she’d put in there the day the trust was signed:
“Don’t leave that store to any one of them. Leave it to all of them, and stay the boss till you’re done. The one who wants it most is the one who’ll take it wrong.”
She has known which one of us that was since before Wade came home from the city.
Nobody yelled. That’s the part I still can’t get over. My brother sat down on the arm of the couch in a room full of people holding birthday cake and could not look at anybody.
He came back the next morning. Mama offered him one thing: the counter, six days a week, at what she pays anybody else, for a year. If he still wanted the store after that, they’d talk about how a person actually earns one.
He said no in March. Said yes in June. He’s been on that register since, and he is very bad at store credit and getting better at it.
She opens at six. Same as always. He’s the one who unlocks the back.