The realtor hesitated when I asked her to read the notarys name off the fake power of attorney, because she already knew that name. It was printed on the business card she had been handing out at my own front door all afternoon.
She had just read the paperwork my son Craig signed to sell my house. It said I signed a power of attorney on March 14th at 2:15 in the afternoon. I handed her my anesthesia record. March 14th, 1:40 to 4:05 p.m., with a breathing tube in my throat on an operating table at Saint Francis.
A woman cannot sign a document in front of a notary while she is unconscious under anesthesia two miles away. The realtor read it twice and said she could not list a property on paperwork like that.
My own son had a notary swear I stood in front of her and signed away my house, on the exact afternoon a surgeon was putting a new hip into me.
Craig said it was a typo, the wrong date. I told him fine, I would sign a new one right now, and then I said, oh wait, I will not. My neighbor Lorraine had already called the sheriffs non-emergency line, because in Oklahoma a false notarization is a felony, and so is forging a signature to transfer property.
The notary whose stamp was on that false document was a woman named Gayle Trunk. And Gayle Trunk was the realtors own partner. The same name on the business card at the door. The two of them ran the listing together, which was how a fraudulent power of attorney and a For Sale sign had appeared on my house in under two weeks.
That was the thing that unraveled it fastest. The realtor had not known, at first, what her own partner had notarized. When she saw her partners stamp on a document I could prove was impossible, she went white, because her license was suddenly standing next to a felony.
I have lived in the same brick house in Tulsa for forty-four years. My husband built the back porch. I buried a dog under the redbud tree. I am seventy-eight and I still mow my own lawn, and I was not going to let a hip fracture be the end of all that just because my son found it convenient.
Craig came every day the first week I was in the hospital. He held my hand and brought me magazines. Then he stopped coming, and a lockbox went on my door, and a sign went in my yard, and he read me a little script on the phone about doing it for my own safety.
His wife Melissa got on the line and told me to be grateful somebody was handling it. I did not argue with either of them. I asked the nurse for a pen, and I wrote down every date. And then I asked for one more thing, a copy of my anesthesia record, and I folded it under my pillow and waited for the open house.
Because I knew. Thirty-eight years of marriage to a careful man teaches you that the truth is usually just a matter of having the right piece of paper at the right time.
The sheriffs deputies were very interested in Gayle Trunks notary journal, which a notary is required by law to keep. It did not have my name in it, because I was never there. What it did have was a pattern, and the realtor, trying to save her own license, handed over everything.
The sale was dead on arrival. You cannot transfer a house with a power of attorney the signer could not have signed. The locks Craig changed were changed back, by a locksmith, with a deputy standing in my driveway.
Craig and Melissa faced the law, not my anger. Forging an elderly parents signature to sell her home is not a family disagreement. The notary lost her commission and faced charges of her own. The realtor cooperated and kept her license by the width of a hair.
I moved back into my brick house with a walker and a home health aide I chose myself. My son thought I could not live alone. The truth is I can, with a little help, and I get to decide what little means, because it is my porch and my redbud tree and my name on the deed, and that name has never once been signed by anyone but me.
Be grateful somebody is handling it, Melissa told me. I am grateful. I am grateful I was a nurse long enough to know that a hospital keeps a record of every minute you are on its table, and that 2:15 in the afternoon, I had the best alibi in Oklahoma.