Part 3 — The Power Bill
The deputy read the name on the power bill slowly, the way a man reads a label he does not want to be true. “The account holder is Regina Littlejohn. Service address, a trailer lot outside Petal. Opened four years ago and paid in cash every month at the co-op window.” My daughter sat down in the grass among the folding chairs, and nobody went to help her up.
Lamar spoke first, loud and fast. “I never heard of that lot, chief. Regina told me she sold some jewelry.” Then he looked at his wife and saw her face, and his voice went out of him like air from a punctured balloon. “Regina. What did you do?”
What she had done came out in pieces, there in my front yard, with the auctioneer still holding his cowboy hat against his chest. Regina had rented the trailer to a man who paid eight hundred dollars a month in envelopes and never gave a last name. She did not ask what he did inside. The power company wanted a living person with identification, so she put the account in her own name, and she kept the lot out of her own paperwork by writing the deed in mine.
“That deed is a forgery,” the deputy said gently. “The name of Mae Littlejohn was copied from a canceled check, and the Social Security number came from a card that belonged to your late husband.” I knew the drawer where that card had been kept, and I had not opened it since the funeral. The county would void the deed that same week and remove the lot from my name, and the debt on it would belong to the person who actually lived behind the paper.
Then the deputy turned to the stubs. All thirty-six, dated and numbered, from the Book of Job. The check-cashing place on Highway 49 kept a ledger and a camera over the counter, and both showed Regina coming in on the first of every month with her driver license. The assessor office had already compared the dates, and it ruled that the money I had paid was money taken from me, not money withheld. The sale on my property was canceled that morning, and the letter said so in writing.
The auctioneer set down his microphone and removed his hat. “Folks, I run an honest business. Nothing leaves this yard.” Then the strangest thing happened. The bidders began to carry my things back up the steps. A big man in a feed-store cap lifted the cedar chest that Otis built for our tenth anniversary and set it down in the front room as gently as if it were asleep. Hattie carried the china of my mother in her own arms, one plate at a time.
The drill set went back into the toolbox. Lamar had to be the one to put it there, because the deputy asked him to. He did it without a word, and when he was done he sat on the bumper of the auction trailer and stayed there until a second car arrived. He answered every question that day, and many more in the weeks after, and the district attorney noted that he had been the first to help.
Regina was charged with forgery, theft from an elderly person, and the matter of the trailer. The judge was a woman who had once been a nurse, and she listened to my daughter for a long time. The sentence included time in the county facility, years of supervision, and an order to repay $11,628 with every cost the county had spent. Lamar sold his used car lot to pay his part and went to work for a man who never bet on anything but the weather.
I went to see Regina once before she began her sentence. She sat across a table from me with her hands folded like a girl in Sunday school. “Mama, I did not think you would count,” she said. “I counted pills for thirty-eight years,” I said. “I can count to thirty-six. I only ever lost track of the Christmases you were not there for.” She wept, and I put my hand over hers, and neither of us said anything for a time.
The first of the next month, I walked to the courthouse myself and paid the property bill at the counter, in person, with a clerk who knew my name. I wrote the amount in the margin of my Bible and put the receipt in the Book of Job, with the stubs. That book has held more than one kind of proof in its life.
There is no shame in being careful with money, and no shame at all in keeping every stub. I told that to my grandchildren on the porch, where Hattie had set out a pitcher of sweet tea and a plate of the pecan cookies my mother taught me to make.
The swing creaked the way it always has. Across the yard the cedar chest sat open in the front room with the sun on its lid, and the china of my mother stood back on its shelf as if nothing at all had happened. Otis would have said that a house is only wood and brick until someone refuses to let it go. I sat down on the swing with my Bible in my lap, and for the first time in three years I was not waiting for a pink notice in the mail.