The notary was a woman named Dolores Vickers, and Hal Brenner told me what he knew in his flat, unhurried fisherman voice while I sat at the kitchen table with the little orange bottle in front of me. Twice before, he said, an elderly woman in Hillsborough County had signed a power of attorney in front of Dolores Vickers, and twice, within a month, the woman had been moved into a care facility in Brandon, where she was kept on heavy sedatives. “It is a pattern,” Hal said. “A bad one. And my old unit has been trying to catch it for a year.”
He drove over that afternoon with a former colleague, a sharp eyed woman from the financial crimes unit of the sheriff named Detective Ramirez. They sat in my living room under the photograph of Dennis, and I laid out the folder. Ramirez turned the pages one at a time. She photographed the forged signature and the listing agreement. She had a pharmacist friend test the pills in the orange bottle, which the label said were for anxiety. The pills, it turned out, were a powerful sedative at four times the amount a woman of my size could take without falling over.
“So here is what we do,” Hal said. “You act just the way you always have. You smile at Bradley. You take your pills, or you pretend to. Friday you let him bring the notary to your door.” I told him I did not know if I could. Hal looked at me with his steady fisherman eyes. “Arlene, Dennis and I fished off the Ringling Bridge for twenty years and I never saw him once afraid of anything. He would want you to do it. You are tougher than you think.”
A mother can forgive a son and still lock the door; wisdom is knowing that both can be acts of love.
I was not tough on Thursday. I made a pot roast I did not eat. I called my daughter in law in Tampa, the one who has never learned my name, and listened to her complain about her gutters. Then I did what Dennis would have done: I went out on the lanai with a cup of tea, and I watched the herons, and I told him all of it, out loud, and the evening breeze coming off the bay seemed to answer. By the time the sun went down I had stopped shaking.
On Friday morning at ten, my doorbell rang. Bradley stood on my welcome mat in a blue blazer, holding a bakery box and smiling the way he did when he was a boy and wanted a second cookie. Beside him was a small woman in a gray suit with a leather satchel. “Mom, this is Dolores,” he said. “She is going to make everything very easy.” I let them in. I offered them coffee. And in the kitchen, behind the pantry door, a young detective in a polo shirt sat very still with a microphone no bigger than a button.
Dolores laid out the deed on my kitchen table. Bradley, who could not stop talking, explained once more about the probate, the rates, and the simple paperwork. He slid the pen toward me. I picked it up, turned it over, and said clearly, “Bradley, I want you to tell me, in front of this lady, why you listed my condo for four hundred and twenty thousand dollars before I signed anything.” The room went absolutely silent. His smile stayed fixed, like a photograph, and then it cracked down the middle.
“Mom, it was just in case,” he began. “Who told you about the listing?” Then he stopped, because he saw the pantry door open. Detective Ramirez walked into the kitchen, followed by Hal in his fishing hat and two uniformed deputies. “Bradley Fiske,” Ramirez said, “I am arresting you for forgery, for exploitation of an elderly person, and for conspiracy.” Dolores Vickers put her hands flat on the table and did not say a word. Her satchel, when the deputies opened it, held four more blank powers of attorney, already stamped.
They took Bradley out in handcuffs through the lobby of my building, past a neighbor with a small dog, and I stood in the doorway and cried. It was not a clean cry. I loved that boy. I had changed his diapers and sat through his recitals and paid for his braces, and I had watched him become a man who looked at his mother and saw an unsold property. Hal put his arm around my shoulders, and said nothing, which was exactly right. Then he made me a cup of tea in my own kitchen, because I could not remember where I kept the kettle.
It took ten months. The judge voided the power of attorney, the listing, and the quitclaim, and my lawyer, a gentle man from the church, made sure that the condo could never be touched without my own hand. The two women in Brandon were released from their facility within a week and returned to their families. Dolores Vickers lost her commission and was sentenced to six years. Bradley pleaded guilty to everything, repaid the money he had taken from me, and accepted a sentence of three years of probation, with a requirement of counseling for his gambling.
He wrote to me in the spring, a letter four pages long, on lined paper, in his schoolboy hand. He said that he had thought of the condo as something already his. He said he was ashamed. He did not ask for anything. I read it on the lanai with the herons, and I wrote back one line: Come for Sunday dinner. He came, in a clean shirt, and sat at the table where Dennis and I had paid bills for twenty years. We ate in silence for a while, and then I passed him the salt, which is what a mother does when she cannot yet say everything.
I still live in the condo, three blocks from the bay, and I am not going anywhere. On the anniversary of our last payment I take a bottle of cheap champagne out to the lanai and pour two glasses, one for me and one for the empty chair. Hal comes by with his fishing pole and a sack of grouper, and the herons stand in the shallows, patient as ever, and I think about how close I came, and what a good friend it takes to keep a woman in her own home.