The patient advocate, Janet Morrow, asked me in front of my son whether I still wanted her to bring in the thing I had given her two days earlier, before Kyle ever arrived. Kyle demanded to know what I gave her.
Two days after my quadruple bypass, before my son flew in from Denver, I was lying in that bed thinking clearly for the first time, and something told me to be careful. So I asked Janet, the hospitals patient advocate, to hold a document safe for me and to witness that I was of sound mind. She wrote it up and had the doctor note it in my chart. I was lucid, competent, and I knew exactly what I owned.
Then Kyle walked in with a lawyer and a notary and a power of attorney, and told me to sign or he would have me declared incompetent, because he had already listed my ranch for sale to a buyer in California.
He thought a man two days out of heart surgery would be easy. I pressed the nurse button three times, which Janet and I had agreed meant bring it all in.
A notary in a cardiac patients room forty-eight hours after surgery, pressuring him to sign over everything, is not just ugly. It is the kind of thing that gets a power of attorney thrown out and a listing agreement unwound. Janet had the doctors competency note, timestamped, from before Kyle ever arrived. His whole scheme rested on me being too weak and confused to resist, and the hospitals own record proved I was neither.
The listing was pulled. Kyle got no power of attorney, no ranch, no California money. He got escorted out by security while his lawyer packed fast.
I am home now, on my own ranch, moving slow but moving. I run the cattle with a good hired man and my nephew, who typed this. Kyle has not called. When he does, he will find his father clear-eyed, competent, and still holding the deed. Three presses of a button. That is all it took.