The voice on the telephone that night was Judge Marjorie Hale, who had been the youngest judge in Lubbock County when I first typed her cases in 1998. She had a cigarette voice then and she had one now, low and a little hoarse, with the habit of coming straight to the point. “Dorothy,” she said before I could even say hello, “I just read what you wrote on the back of that menu. I have been a judge for thirty one years, and I have never seen a cleaner record. I want you in my chambers at nine o clock tomorrow morning. Bring your cane and your pen.”
I looked at the clock on the wall of my hospital room. It was ten past eight in the evening. The nurse, Jesus, who had stayed past his shift, had been standing in the doorway holding the patient advocate by the elbow. Her name was Mrs. Abernathy, a brisk woman in a green cardigan, and she had read both pages of my notes with her mouth pressed into a line. She had called the county. The county had called the judge. And the judge, who remembered me, had called me. Sometimes the world is small in a good way.
At nine the next morning, a hospital volunteer wheeled me into the old county courthouse. I had not been in that building since my retirement party, six years earlier, and the smell of floor wax and old paper went straight to my heart. The judge sat behind her desk with her robe off, in a plain blue suit, and rose when I came in. She hugged me, which she had never done in forty years. Then she sat me in the good leather chair, turned on a tape recorder, and said, “Dorothy, I want you to read me what you heard. Word for word. Take your time.”
I read it from the menu, from beginning to end. Time, speaker, exact words. The petition is filed with the county. Temporary guardianship, emergency basis, post operative confusion. Once you are guardian, you can sell it to pay for her care. Willow Creek has a bed open Thursday. Locked memory unit. The judge listened without moving. When I finished, she leaned back in her chair and said, quietly, “That petition crossed my desk Friday. I denied it. I did not like the look of the affidavit of the doctor. I wanted to see you in person.”
When a person has spent a lifetime recording what others say, her memory becomes the most honest witness in the room.
The lawyer in the suit, she told me, was named Gordon Teague. He had filed emergency guardianship petitions against five elderly women in Lubbock County in the last two years, all of them widows living alone in homes worth more than two hundred thousand dollars. Three had been placed at Willow Creek. Two had died there within a year. The family members who petitioned had all received power over the estates, and the houses had been sold, quietly, to the same two real estate companies. The judge had suspected for months. She had lacked a witness.
“You are my witness, Dorothy,” she said. “A court reporter. You are the most credible witness I could possibly have.” I told her I would testify. I told her I wanted to see the folder on every woman. She slid a folder across the desk. The five faces looked up at me from the photographs, gray haired, smiling for the camera, unsuspecting. I recognized one of them from my church. Her name was Edith, and she had died in her sleep at Willow Creek in March, and I had gone to the funeral and thought nothing of it at all.
My daughter arrived at ten, summoned by the bailiff of the judge. Stacy stood in the doorway of chambers in her work blouse with her hair in a clip, her face already crumpling. She had not slept. When she saw me in the chair, with the judge and the tape recorder and the folder, she walked across the room and dropped to her knees. “Mama,” she said, “I am so sorry. I did it. I did all of it. I will tell them everything.” I looked down at her. She was forty seven years old, and she looked just like she did at six.
She told it between sobs. Her husband had been laid off the year before. The medical bills for her son had piled up. Teague had come to her at the church supper, a smooth man in a good suit, and told her about a way to protect the family assets, a way that was perfectly legal and perfectly common, and that would give her the means to care for me. She had believed him. She had signed whatever he handed her. She had never thought about Edith, or the others, or what a locked memory unit would feel like to a woman who knew exactly what day it was.
I did not say a word for a long time. The judge sat very still. At last I reached out and put my hand on the wet cheek of my daughter. I told her that she had made a terrible mistake, and that she would have to answer for it, and that I would be sitting right beside her when she did. I said a mother could forgive nearly anything, but she could not do it for a stranger. The stranger had been Edith, and the others, and I was going to see to it that they were heard.
Stacy testified for the state. Gordon Teague was arrested at his office on Friday afternoon, and by the following spring he was serving twelve years in a federal prison. Willow Creek was investigated and its administrator was removed. Stacy was given probation and five hundred hours of community service, at a senior center, where she serves lunch to the very women she might have harmed. She cried the first day. By the third week, she was laughing at the crossword with an eighty year old man named Walter.
I went home to my own house, my own bed, and my cat, on a Thursday. The walker sat in the corner like a polite guest. Stacy brought a casserole and set the table for two. After dinner, I got out my steno machine from the closet, dusty from disuse, and tapped a few words on the keys, just to feel them. Pickles jumped onto the kitchen chair and watched with her yellow eyes. Stacy came and sat beside me. “What are you writing, Mama?” she asked. I looked at the tape. “The truth,” I said. “Somebody has to keep it.”