I sat on a bench outside the Old City of Jerusalem with the bells ringing and listened to my brother Lester tell me that Tiffany had come and taken my garage remote with a letter. From Dale. My husband, dead since March.
Les, I said, Dale has been gone seven months. And Lester said, I know. That is what I need to talk to you about.
Tiffany had forged it. A letter on Dales old stationery, in handwriting close enough to fool a grieving seventy-one-year-old uncle, saying that Dale wanted his daughter to have a key to look after the family. She had waved it at Lester, and he, soft-hearted and still mourning his brother-in-law, handed over the remote I had mailed him to keep an eye on the place.
With it she opened my garage, painted my front door purple, and moved in with her husband and a new crib, into a townhouse she did not know I owned, bought with my own teachers retirement, not one dollar of Dales money she had warned me at the funeral not to touch.
The Huntsville police came in the morning, kind about the baby, firm about the facts. My name on the deed, alone. No key given, no permission, a forged letter used to take a remote. The forgery is its own crime, and it does not get smaller because it is family.
She told the whole funeral I had better not touch Daddys money. Then she forged Daddys words to take the home I bought with mine.
I flew home and did not go to war over a grandchild. I told Tiffany she and the baby could stay three days while she arranged somewhere real to go, and not one hour longer, and that the purple door was coming off in my color, and that she would answer to the law for the letter whether I liked it or not, because forging a dead mans hand is a line.
Lester wept on my porch, ashamed he had been fooled. I told him what I tell everyone. Grief makes good people easy to trick. It is not your sin, Les. It is hers.
The door is white now. The deed is in a safe box. And I went back to that prayer I left folded at the Western Wall, and I meant every word of it.