“…the name on the witness line was Odette Guidry,” Mr. Landry said, and I sat in his paneled office on Third Street with the mantel clock on his desk between us and my stomach turned cold. Odette had been my closest friend for forty one years. She had stood beside me at my wedding. She had held my hand at the service for my husband Claude. She was a notary public, and a church deacon, and the godmother of my son Eric, and she had been in my kitchen on a Tuesday, drinking my coffee, only days before the form was filed.
Mr. Landry laid it all out. The trust that Claude had created in 1998 held our house, the savings, and a rental cottage near the lake. It named me as the lifetime trustee, and it said no change could be made without two signatures: mine, and a witness approved by Mr. Landry office. Somebody had filed a form to add Eric as co trustee. The signature looked like mine. But on that date, according to the calendar on my refrigerator, I had been at my sister in Lafayette with the flu. Mr. Landry had checked the witness line and recognized the name.
I held the folded note from inside the clock. It was in Claude small, tidy hand, from the autumn before he passed. Nadine, if you have found this, someone has already come asking. Do not argue with Eric. Do not accuse anyone. Call Landry, take the clock, and let the papers speak. I love you. Do not let a good clock stop. I read it three times. Then I asked Mr. Landry the question I most dreaded. “Does Eric know that Odette signed?” He took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes, and said, “Mrs. Foster, I believe Eric asked her to.”
A Seth Thomas mantel clock with a loose panel, a note in a late husband hand, and a witness line with a trusted name.
I drove to Odette house that afternoon, with the clock in a shopping bag on the passenger seat. She opened the door in her garden apron, her silver hair pinned up, and her face when she saw me was as pale as the paint. She did not say hello. She stepped aside and let me in. In her sunroom, among the orchids and the Bible commentaries, I set the clock on her glass table and said, “Odette, tell me what you did.” She sat down, and she wept like a woman who had been waiting for months to be caught.
She said that Eric had come to her in the spring, crying, with a story of debts he could not pay. Online poker. He owed sixty three thousand dollars to people who had begun to call his house at night. He said that if he could be a co trustee, he could borrow against the cottage and pay it all off before I ever knew. He had begged her. She was his godmother. She had notarized a form she knew was forged. “I told myself it was a kindness,” she said. “God forgive me, Nadine, I told myself it would save him.”
I did not forgive her at once. I sat with my hands in my lap and looked at the orchids. Forty one years do not vanish in an afternoon, but neither does a betrayal. I told her that she would go to Mr. Landry the next morning and give a full statement, and that she would surrender her notary commission. She nodded. She said she had already written her resignation to the church board. We sat in the quiet for a long time, two old women, with a clock between us that did not tick.
Eric came to my house the following evening. He was fifty one years old, balding, soft around the middle, and he looked like a boy who has been sent to the principal. He did not say a word as I laid the forged form, the clock, and his father note on the dining table. He read the note with trembling lips. At the line about not letting a good clock stop, he broke down. He said, “Mama, I have been so afraid.” I said, “I know, baby. I know. Sit down.”
We made an arrangement that night. Eric would enter a recovery program at a clinic in New Orleans, and attend meetings for gamblers every week for as long as it took. The debts would be settled by Mr. Landry through a lawyer, using a modest portion of the cottage rental income, paid directly to the creditors, never to Eric. The trust would be amended so that a share of it, after my time, would go not to Eric but to his two children for their schooling. Eric signed every page in his own, honest hand.
Odette kept her word. She gave her statement to Mr. Landry on Thursday, in a gray cardigan, without a lawyer, and she signed it with a steady hand. The notary board suspended her commission for three years. Our church friends were kind to her, mostly, and unkind a little, as church friends can be. I visited her on Sundays with a pound cake. We did not speak of the form. We spoke of her orchids, and of Claude, and of the summer in 1979 when the three of us drove to Galveston and got sunburned in a single afternoon, and laughed until we cried.
A clockmaker on Perkins Road repaired the mantel clock in March. He told me it needed only a new spring, and a good cleaning, and that it was a fine Seth Thomas from 1952. When I carried it home and set it back on the mantel, it began, after a moment, to tick. Eric was sitting on the sofa. He listened to it for a long time. Then he stood, and wound it with the little brass key, exactly the way his father had, and the chime rang out through the house, round and warm.