Tammy needed the name of Corinne, not the house in Fresno. I learned that at a quarter to nine on Tuesday, when Hector the mail carrier waited at my gate with a thick envelope that had slipped through before the forwarding order took hold. It came from the Department of Real Estate. It was addressed to Tammy Ashford, and it announced that her broker license had been suspended since June for mishandling a client trust account. I sat on my porch step in Westchester and read it twice. Hector stood there turning his cap in his hands. “Miss Corinne,” he said, “I thought you ought to see the whole thing before it got lost again.”
Everything else came together on my kitchen table with a pen and the calendar from the feed store. License suspended in June. Change of address filed in July, so no letters would reach me. Ashford Holdings registered in August, with me listed as the only officer, because a woman of seventy seven with forty years of clean payroll records and no debts looks very good on a loan form. The roof fund CD, forty six thousand dollars that Dale and I saved for fifteen years, paid the down payment on the house of my sister Maxine in Fresno. Maxine, who is eighty one and forgetful, had been told that I approved the sale.
I called Maxine at her assisted living place off Shaw Avenue. She cried and said, “Corrie, Tammy said you wanted it quiet.” Then she told me the rest: Tammy had brought a notary with a stamp, the notary asked no questions, and the price was far below what the house was worth. Gary and Tammy planned to flip it by Christmas and use the profit to cover what Tammy owed a client in Delano. If anything went wrong, the papers pointed to one signature. Mine. I put my hands flat on the table and thought of Dale, who used to say a pumpjack only works if somebody keeps oiling it.
A forwarding order gave one daughter in law the length of a weekend to bring her mother in law back to the truth in Bakersfield.
I gave my terms to Gary and Tammy in the driveway of their house in Shafter on Saturday morning, with Hector holding the envelope, my lawyer Estela Macias holding a clipboard and Maxine holding my arm. I said the sale would be reversed by Friday, that Ashford Holdings would be dissolved, and that every dollar of the roof fund would return to my account. I said Tammy would never again put my name on any paper. I said I would not go to the district attorney if they did it all in writing, and I laid a pen on the hood of their truck.
Tammy did the talking, and she did it fast, the way people talk when they have practiced a lie for months and hope the truth will run out of room. She said the suspension happened because she borrowed from a client account to pay for the kitchen of Gary, that the flipping plan was supposed to fix it, and that she picked my name because she thought it was only paper. Gary stood by the truck looking at his boots. He said, “Mom, I told her to stop.” I said, “Gary, you let her photograph my Medicare card.” He had no answer for that.
Tammy grabbed the pen and the clipboard, snatched the papers right out of the hands of Estela, meaning to run into the house and lock the door, and she bolted across the lawn in her good heels. Estela, who has practiced law for thirty years, called, “Mrs. Ashford, I have copies.” Tammy did not hear. Gary shouted. Maxine said, “Is this the part where somebody gets arrested?” I patted her hand and told her no, this was the part where Tammy found out what a Saturday in the country looks like.
A pickup with a long livestock trailer was backing out of the next driveway, and about twelve 4 H goats in costumes were being walked across the lawn toward it for the county fair parade, each in a little felt vest and a ribbon. Tammy ran into the middle of them. Goats scattered, goats leaned, goats ate the corner of the contract. A girl of about ten, in a green 4 H shirt, said, “Lady, you have to say excuse me to Penelope.” Penelope, a brown and white goat with a bow, then stood on the shoe of Tammy and did not move.
Estela got the Fresno sale reversed in eleven days, with a letter from the state and a statement from the notary, who lost her commission. Ashford Holdings was dissolved. The roof fund came back to my account, less the legal fees, and the roof of Dale was finally replaced in March by a crew from Delano that charged less than I expected. Gary and Tammy sold the Shafter house and moved to Visalia. Gary calls on Sundays now. He is awkward about it. I answer on the third ring and talk about the weather, and we both pretend it is just the weather.
In the name of Dale, who passed in 2021, I started the Dale Ashford Pumpjack Fund. It pays for credit freezes, title monitoring and lawyer time for older people whose names have been used on property papers, in Kern, Tulare and Fresno counties. In the first year we helped seventeen households, and the first was a retired oil field welder from Taft named Mr. Beasley whose nephew had filed a quitclaim deed on his house. Estela handles the cases at cost. I make the coffee. Maxine folds the thank you letters into thirds and keeps them in a shoebox under her bed.
In March the new roof went on, and Maxine came down on the bus to watch. We sat in lawn chairs in the driveway with a thermos and a plate of lemon bars, and when the crew laid the last shingle, Maxine clapped like it was a ballgame. I took the empty CD envelope from my purse and wrote on the back, in the favorite pencil of Dale, “Roof, paid.” I tucked it into the old coffee can in the garage where he kept his spare washers. The sun came down on the new gray shingles, and for a minute the whole street smelled like tar and lemon.