The notary stamp on the deed was dated March the ninth, and the signature of my husband Ken was dated March the eleventh. I read the two dates side by side under the light of the porch lamp, with a robin egg blue Easter basket on the swing beside me and the cold coming up through my slippers. The paper had been stamped two days before anyone signed it. In the fifty one years of our marriage, I had learned to read a bank statement, a seed catalog, and a doctor note. I had never before read the face of a lie.
I went inside and sat at the kitchen table with Ken, who was seventy nine and sharp as ever behind his glasses, though he had been in the hospital three times that winter and the family had begun speaking of him in the past tense. I laid the deed on the table between us. I did not explain. I simply asked him whether he remembered signing it. He picked it up, read the first line, and set it down again. “Joyce,” he said, quietly, “I have never seen this before.”
I called our daughter Meredith, who lived thirty minutes away in the town of Springfield, and asked her to come with her husband. She arrived within the hour, in a rush, still wearing her work badge. Her husband Craig followed with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. I told them what I had found. Meredith looked at the deed for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice was thin. “Craig, you told me Dad signed it at the office of the lawyer. You told me he was so happy.”
When a family begins to speak about a living man in the past tense, the first thing to disappear is the question of whether he can still speak for himself.
Craig said nothing. He stood in the kitchen doorway looking like a boy caught with a stolen cookie. I had never really liked him, though I had tried. He was a big, smooth, smiling man who sold insurance and always seemed to be calculating something behind his eyes. He asked if he might sit. I said he could stand. Ken, meanwhile, had taken a clean legal pad from the drawer and begun to write, in his steady old handwriting, a statement in his own words.
Ken wrote for thirty minutes. When he finished, he read it aloud to the three of us, slowly, in the voice he used to use at church meetings. He stated that he was of sound mind. He stated that he had never signed any deed transferring the farm or the house. He stated that he did not authorize anyone to act on his behalf. He signed it and dated it, and he asked Meredith to call his doctor so that a nurse could witness his signature and note his clear thinking in the record.
The doctor came out the very next morning, which amazed me, and the nurse stood in our living room with her clipboard while Ken completed a long list of questions. What year was it, who was the president, what was the name of our first dog. He answered everything, and a few questions more. The nurse smiled and wrote a line at the bottom of the form in blue ink. I kept a copy of that line in my purse for the rest of the year. It said, clear and fully oriented.
The lawyer, a kind woman named Ms. Reyes, took our statement and the doctor note to the county recorder. The deed was set aside within the week. The notary, a man in the office building of Craig, admitted that he had stamped a blank page at the request of Craig, believing it was for a different matter, and he lost his commission. Craig himself resigned from his firm before they could ask. He had borrowed against the farm, in the hope of paying it back before anyone noticed.
Meredith did a brave thing. She sat on our sofa and cried for an hour, and then she stood up, wiped her face, and said that she was going to stand by her parents. She said that she should have asked questions months ago, and she would make up for it. She and Craig separated that spring. Their son, Tyler, who was twelve, moved in with us for the summer, and he and Ken built a tiny birdhouse together in the garage, painted the same pale blue as the Easter egg.
Tyler held it up when it was finished. “Grandpa, it looks like an egg with a door,” he said. Ken laughed so hard he had to sit on an overturned bucket. They hung it from the oak tree in the front yard, and within the week a pair of sparrows moved in. I watched them from the kitchen window every morning, bringing twigs and bits of string. It was the kind of small thing a woman never gets tired of watching.
Ken is eighty one now, and still very much with me. We have a new rule in our house, which is that no paper gets signed without both of us reading every word. I keep the old deed in a drawer, with the wrong date circled in red. Sometimes I take it out and look at it, and I think of how close we came to losing everything. Then I look out the window at the oak tree, and the little blue house, and I am grateful.