My friend Gladys Fontenot has practiced law in Lake Charles for forty years, and she is the only person I know who can read a legal paper without moving her lips. I took the quitclaim deed and the photograph to her office on Ryan Street that same afternoon. She put on her glasses and read the deed twice. Then she tapped a line near the bottom with her pencil and said, “Patricia, in Louisiana a husband cannot give away the home of a married couple without the signature of his wife. Where is yours?”
The line was right there, below the signature of Frank. “Spouse concurring: Patricia Anne Lowell.” And beside it, in blue ink, a signature that looked very much like mine. The loops were right. The slant was right. It was the signature I had written on report cards and permission slips for thirty five years. I stared at it until my eyes burned. Then I said, “Gladys, my middle name is Marie. I have never in my life signed Anne.” She sat back in her chair. “Then somebody forged you,” she said. “And I think I know who.”
I did not want to know. I drove to Baton Rouge anyway, an hour on the interstate with the radio off. Kimberly lived in a big house in a gated neighborhood with a fountain and two SUVs in the drive. I rang the bell at dusk. She opened the door in a gray sweatshirt with her hair in a knot and no makeup, and when she saw my face she did not say hello. She said, “Mama, I was going to tell you.” I said, “Everyone is going to tell me. I would like somebody to just tell me.”
A lie can borrow a signature for a while, but the truth has the original, and it always comes to collect.
She told it standing on the porch with her arms wrapped around herself. It had started with a birthday dinner for a friend in 2017, a roll of chips at the casino. She won. Then she lost. Then she borrowed, from the casino, from the trust account of the law firm, from a man in Lafayette who lent money in parking lots. By the spring of 2019 she owed two hundred thousand dollars. “I was going to prison, Mama,” she said. “I was going to lose my children.”
Frank had found out. Her father drove to Baton Rouge on a Sunday in his work clothes and sat at her kitchen table until she told him everything. He did not shout. He cried. Then he drove to Lake Charles, found the man who held the markers, and traded the only thing he had left to give. Kimberly wept. “He made me promise to tell you, Mama. He said he could not die with a lie in the house. And then he got sick, and I kept saying next week, next month, next year.”
“And my signature?” I asked. She covered her face. “The man said the deed was not enough. He wanted a second guarantee, with the signature of a spouse, in case Daddy died and you contested it. I was so scared. I took a paper from your desk last Christmas and practiced until I could do it. I thought nobody would ever look.” I stood on that porch and I felt many things at once, anger and heartbreak and shame, but the one that rose to the top was an old teacher habit. I said, “Kimberly, you know what I am going to say.”
She nodded. “Tell the truth.” I said, “Tell it to the district attorney, and tell it to your firm, and tell it to your husband. I will go with you. I will sit next to you. But I will not lie for you, and I will not let you lie again.” She cried for a long time on the steps of her fine house. Then she went inside, changed her clothes, kissed her sleeping children, and got in my car. We drove back to Lake Charles in the dark, and she did not say a word until we reached the courthouse.
The district attorney, a tired man named Guidry, listened to my daughter for two hours. Gladys sat beside her, taking notes. At the end he said that the forged signature voided the deed, that the markers were unenforceable against a woman who had never signed them, and that Bayou Land Partners would be asked to explain a number of things to a grand jury. He looked at Kimberly. “Counselor, you have confessed to forgery and embezzlement. Do you understand what that means?” She said, “Yes, sir. I understand.”
It took eight months. The judge annulled the quitclaim deed in March. The man in the golf shirt, whose name was Duplantis, was indicted for fraud and extortion along with the owner of the markers, and the movers never returned. Kimberly pleaded guilty and received five years of probation, full restitution to her firm, and mandatory treatment. She resigned her job. Her husband Brad stood beside her through all of it, thinner and grayer. When the judge asked if she had anything to say, she turned to me in the gallery and said, “Mama, I am sorry.”
In April the magnolia bloomed. Frank planted it the day we moved in, and every spring it covers the lawn with enormous white flowers. On a Saturday, Kimberly came to the house in old jeans and a straw hat, carrying a rake and a bag of mulch, and without a word she began to work. I made lemonade. I sat on the porch swing and watched my daughter, forty five years old now, kneel in the dirt beside the tree of her father. After an hour I carried out a glass and a red pen, and I set the pen on the rail. “For your homework,” I said. “Start with the truth.”