I called Jerrys wife instead of Jerry, and when I read her the paragraph from the 1995 agreement, she was quiet a long time. Then she said, Barb, I was there when Walt made him sign that. Jerry has forgotten, but I have not. That house is yours. I will see to it myself.
The agreement Jerry brought with the donuts and the lawyer was the 1994 one, the one that put our house up as collateral and gave the surviving partner the business and the property. But Walt, bless his careful heart, had made Jerry sign a second agreement one year later, in 1995, notarized, with a paragraph that released our house as collateral entirely and said that on Walts death his share passed to me, free and clear, not to Jerry.
Jerry either forgot that paragraph or hoped I had never seen it. Walt taped it under the seat of the porch swing he built from the old gin office boards, and told me there was a spare key to the gin in the swing. This was the key.
Jerry cried at Walts picture and then handed me papers to take my house. The newer papers, in Walts own swing, handed it right back.
Jerrys wife was true to her word. She made him bring the 1995 agreement to his own lawyer, who confirmed it superseded the 1994 one completely. Jerrys claim on my house evaporated. He never got to let me stay till Christmas out of pity, because there was nothing of his to be generous with.
He came back around a few weeks later, embarrassed, and did have a donut that time, and apologized, and I let him, because thirty-eight years of partnership with Walt counts for something even when a man forgets himself.
I still sit on the porch swing every evening, the one Walt built from the boards of the old gin office. Walt said there was a spare key to the gin in it. He meant the key to keeping the home we built, and he was right, the way he usually was, one year and one notarized paragraph ahead of trouble.