“Mrs. Batts, here is the address of the moving company,” Jada said, pressing a towel to my wet blouse. “And I took a picture of the invoice she left on the chair. Eastbrook Moving. Ten in the morning.” The clock above the mirror said ten forty. Anger came up in me, the clean kind, the kind I used to feel when a senior turned in a stolen essay. “Jada, may I borrow your phone?” I asked. I did not call my son. I called a boy I once failed on a research paper in 1999, because I remembered his number from the Christmas card he sends me every single year.
Marcus Dillard is a Wake County deputy now, and he answered on the second ring. “Mrs. Batts? Is something wrong?” “Marcus, I need you at my house on Hargett Street with a patrol car. People are carrying out my furniture.” “Yes, Mrs. Batts,” he said, exactly the way he said it in third period. I stood at the sink with foam on my head and listened to him call it in. Then Jada drove me herself in her little blue Honda, a half done color job on my head and a towel around my shoulders, running two red lights that I will deny.
We turned onto my street and there it was, a white truck backed up to my green shutters. Two men were carrying the piano bench of my mother. A third was wrapping the sideboard of Clarence in blankets. On the porch stood a small man in a bow tie with a notary stamp and a clipboard, and beside him Shonda, in her cream blazer, signing something against his arm. Her smile stopped when she saw me climbing out of a car with wet hair and foam on my scalp. It did not stop at the cheekbones this time. It fell straight off her face.
A whispered warning at a salon sink and a former student with a badge stopped a forged deed on a Raleigh porch and gave a retired teacher a brand new Friday ritual.
Deputy Dillard pulled in right behind us, lights turning, and he walked up my steps like a man who had once been made to spell necessary twenty times. “Which of you is the homeowner?” he asked. “I am,” I said. “That woman is my daughter in law, and she is standing on my porch holding a deed I have never seen.” Shonda lifted it with her best car alarm laugh. “Marcus, this is a family matter. Clarence signed it, and Mr. Pruitt here has notarized it. Everything is legal.” Marcus took the paper, read it slowly, and looked at the little man in the bow tie.
The notary was named Eugene Pruitt, and he went the color of paste. The date beside the signature of Clarence said this very morning, and his seal swore that Clarence Batts had appeared in front of him in person. “Sir,” Marcus said gently, “Mr. Batts passed three years ago. Did he come by taxi?” Eugene began talking and could not stop. Shonda had paid him eight hundred dollars. The buyer was a cousin of hers who flipped houses in Garner. The movers had been told it was an estate clean out. To their credit, they set down my sideboard and apologized to me one by one.
Then Jada did something I will treasure. She held up her phone. She had recorded Shonda in the salon last Thursday, three minutes and forty seconds, the entire phone call, loud as a car alarm. She had played it for Deputy Dillard in the driveway while I stood there in a towel. “I did not know if anybody would believe a hairdresser,” she said. “Child,” I said, “I taught English for thirty three years. I believe the girl with the evidence.” Shonda rode to the station that afternoon in a vehicle a good deal less comfortable than the leather seats of her SUV.
Jerome came to my kitchen that night and sat where he used to do his homework. He had not known. I believe that, because I watched his face, and his face has never learned to lie. Shonda had told him I was longing to move somewhere with no stairs. He cried quietly, and I handed him a dish towel. “The house cannot be sold,” I told him. “Your father put it in a living trust in 2015 with a lawyer on Fayetteville Street. It goes to a scholarship fund for the children of teachers, or to you, if you can earn it.” “How do I earn it?” “Start with three hundred eighty dollars,” I said.
He paid the three hundred eighty dollars the next morning, in cash, in an envelope with a note: “For your birthday. Late.” Shonda took a plea. She repaid what she had pulled from the old pharmacy accounts of Clarence, which I only learned about when the lawyer checked the records, and she lost her real estate license for good. The cousin buyer was fined. I changed the locks, the garage code and even the password for the thermostat, because I had learned something about thoroughness. And I kept my promise to Jada, the one I made on the ride home with foam still drying on my head.
The old pharmacy building on Glenwood Avenue belonged to Clarence and me, rented out for years to a vape shop. When that lease ended, I phoned Jada. “How would you like your own chair?” I asked. She did not answer, so I kept going. “Your name on the door. No rent for two years. I will bring the cookies.” She cried so hard she had to sit on the curb. We painted the walls a soft green to match my shutters. We kept the brass counter bell of Clarence by the door, and a plain sign that says Jada and Company, Hair for Women Who Know Better.
I was her first customer, of course. Every other Friday, same day, same time, a different salon at last but the same habit. When she rinsed my hair at the sink in the front window of what used to be a pharmacy, I tipped my head back and watched sunlight come through the glass the way it did when Clarence opened the store at midnight for a sick child. “Is the water all right?” Jada asked. “Perfect,” I said. “And do not turn it up, dear. Nobody in this room has a thing left to whisper to me.”