Part 3 — Box Two Fourteen
The bag held four things. A wedding band of thin yellow gold with a scratch on the inside. A necklace of small pearls with a clasp mended with wire. A gold watch that had belonged to the father of Glenda. And a folded document with a county recording stamp on it. The ring was the one my wife wore for forty-one years. I had searched the house for it the week she died and had told myself it was lost in the hospital laundry.
Ms. Dunaway unfolded the document with a gloved hand and laid it on the desk. It was a deed. Quitclaim, signed Raymond L. Teague, transferring my home on the Old Union Road to Jody and Brandi, recorded in the county in May. “This was recorded four months ago,” she said. “You have not owned your home since the spring, Mr. Teague, on paper. Today you were being asked to sign it a second time, to cover the first.” I stared at the paper and thought that I had never seen a thing so ugly in such a clean hand.
A forged deed carries no title, she told me, and she said it three times, slowly, as if she knew I would need to hear it. In Texas a forged deed is void from the beginning, and the county clerk would, on petition, strike it from the record. The bank would restore my account in full, with interest, and the state examiners would report the former teller and the branch for not reading what they had signed. I would owe nothing on the loan that Jody wanted, because the loan had never been made.
Brandi had stopped yelling. She sat in a chair with her pink jacket pulled around her, and she looked at the pearls on the desk the way a person looks at a photograph of herself taken years ago. “I only borrowed them,” she said. “I was going to put them back.” Ms. Dunaway said gently that a person cannot borrow from a safe deposit box with a power of attorney that was signed on a hospital gurney by a man full of tubes.
Jody was still on the bank floor. I got down next to him, slowly, which for a man with my knees took some doing. I did not hold his hand. I said, “Son, tell me when you stopped being my boy.” He said, with his face in his sleeve, “I do not know, Pop. It was a little at a time. That is the worst of it.” I knew what he meant. I had watched my savings go the same way.
Two deputies of Angelina County had been waiting in the office of the branch manager. They came out quietly and stood beside Brandi and Jody, and one of them said that he would like to read them their rights, but that he would do it in the parking lot, out of consideration for the other customers. Mr. Boudreaux, the bank president, held the door. Brandi walked out first, her nails in her pocket. Jody followed, looking at the floor.
The charges were forgery, exploitation of an elderly person, and theft. The prosecutor, who knew my route because her mother had received her mail from me, offered a plea. Jody and Brandi accepted. The court sentenced both to prison terms, probation after that, and a restitution order of $38,750 for the savings, with the legal fees. The bass boat and the deck were never built. The pink jacket, I am told, went to a consignment shop in Nacogdoches.
The bank gave me back my savings on a Wednesday. Ms. Dunaway came to the branch to see it done, and the teller who counted it into my hands was a young woman I had never met, with careful nails and a steady voice. She counted twice. “Mr. Teague,” she said, “I am sorry it took so long.” I told her that a mail carrier is paid to be patient, and I thanked her, and I put the receipt in my wallet where the photograph of Glenda has been for years.
The ring Ms. Dunaway returned to me in an evidence envelope after the plea, with my signature on a form. I did not put it on my finger. I carried it home in my shirt pocket and set it on the dresser. That night I took the old leather mail satchel out of the hall closet, from behind the winter coat of Glenda, and I slid the ring into the inside pocket, next to the copy of the withdrawal form I had kept for so long.
The pearls I gave to the daughter of my neighbor on the day of her recital. I told her they had belonged to a woman who loved music, and she said, “Was she nice?” I said she was the nicest person I ever knew. The pearls looked right against her white dress, and for a moment the whole auditorium seemed a little brighter.
Seven hundred and twelve boxes on one route taught me that people are mostly honest, and that the few who are not leave a paper trail a mile wide. I thought of that when I walked out of the bank into the white Texas light with my savings, my ring and my name.
On Sunday I put on my good shirt and went to the cemetery with a thermos. The grass was cut and the sky was a hard Texas blue. I sat on the bench near the stone of Glenda and told her the whole story, from the hospital to the bank floor, in the order it happened. I told her that I had slept eight hours the night before. I told her that the mail still came every day, rain or shine, and that for the first time in two years I was glad to open it.