“…Henry Castellanos, by power of attorney held by Raymond Castellanos,” the county clerk read, and I sat on the curb in front of my old house on Nogalitos Street with the telephone pressed against my ear and a sharp pain in my chest that I knew was not my heart. A power of attorney. I had never signed one. I looked at Rosa roses, brown and dry by the fence, and I thought of the day we had planted them, in 1974, when Ray was a toddler in diapers and I was a young man with a brand new job at the H E B warehouse.
The clerk, whose name was Mrs. Reyes, told me gently that the loan was for one hundred and ninety thousand dollars, secured against the Nogalitos property, filed at a title company on Broadway. The borrower was listed as Henry Castellanos, represented by his attorney in fact. The signature of the attorney in fact was Ray. The power of attorney itself had been notarized in 2022, in a month when, according to the calendar in my kitchen, I had been in the hospital with pneumonia. I had never seen the paper. I had not been asked.
I took the 51 bus home, because I did not know what else to do. I sat by the window with my hands on my knees. The young woman with the baby on her hip, the tenant on Nogalitos, had waved at me from the porch as I left. She had not known she was renting from a thief. I thought about her, and the little boy in her arms, and the black truck in the driveway. I thought, they must be paying eighteen hundred dollars to a man who does not own the house, and I will have to tell them.
A power of attorney never signed, a house still billed in the wrong name, and six red rose bushes planted along a fence.
I called my granddaughter Marisol that night. She is twenty six, a paralegal at a firm on Broadway, quiet and serious, with Rosa eyes. She came to my apartment the next morning with a laptop and a folder, and she sat at my small kitchen table and listened to every word. When I finished, she did not say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Grandpa, I am going to take you to see Ms. Valdez.” Ms. Valdez was a senior attorney at her firm, a tall woman with silver bracelets and a voice like warm syrup. She took my case that afternoon.
Ms. Valdez moved quickly. She froze the loan before it could fund. She filed a complaint with the county, and with the state notary board, and with the title company. She obtained the original power of attorney and had it examined. The notary, it turned out, was a young woman who worked at Ray real estate office, and who had stamped the paper in his presence without ever meeting me. She was frightened. She said that Ray had told her I was too tired to come in, and that I had given verbal permission.
Ray arrived at Ms. Valdez office on Friday, in a navy suit, with a bottle of water and a folder of his own. He was fifty two years old, round faced, with his mother nose, and he had been crying in the car. He saw me in the chair by the window, and he stopped in the doorway, and he said, “Pop.” That was all. I said, “Sit down, Ray.” He sat, and for some time the only sound was the air conditioner. Then he said, in a small, flat voice, “I was going to pay it all back.”
It had started in 2021, he said, right after Rosa passed. He had bought two rental properties in a boom, and the market had turned. He owed more than he owned. He had seen the Nogalitos house, empty after I moved out, and had thought, only for a year, only until things recovered. He had told himself that Rosa would have understood. “She would not have,” I said. He put his face in his hands. I looked at the top of his head, at the thinning hair, and I remembered the boy on my shoulders at the Fiesta parade.
Ms. Valdez laid out the options. The tenants could be kept on, as lawful lessees, paying me directly. The loan would be cancelled. Ray would sell his two properties and repay the rent he had collected, every cent, with interest, over time. He would resign his real estate license voluntarily. And he would agree, in writing, to a monitor on all his financial dealings with the family for ten years. The district attorney, informed of these terms, agreed not to press charges, provided Ray complied. He signed everything. His hand was shaking so hard the pen skidded.
Tanya and her little boy, whose name was Mateo, stayed on in the Nogalitos house as lawful tenants, paying a fair rent of fourteen hundred dollars directly to me, by check, on the first of the month. I told her to keep the truck. She laughed and said it was not hers, it was her brother. On Sundays, she brought me a plate of tamales wrapped in foil, still warm, and Mateo, who was two, would climb onto my knee and pat my face with his sticky hands. I thought that Rosa would have approved of them both entirely.
In April, I took Marisol to Nogalitos Street with a flat of new rose bushes. The young woman with the baby, whose name was Tanya, met us on the porch and said, wide eyed, that she had heard everything, and that she was so sorry, and that she was glad it was me. We planted the roses along the fence, six of them, red ones, the kind Rosa liked. Ray came after work, in jeans and a gray T shirt, and without a word he took a shovel and dug the last hole. When he finished, he stood up and said, quietly, “Pop, I will make this right.” I watered the roots.