“…the notary at my own bank,” I told June in the car, and she gripped the steering wheel of her old blue Buick as though it were a railing on a ship. It was a ten minute drive to the First Lehigh Savings branch on Hamilton Street, where I had kept my checking account for fifty one years. June parked in the handicapped space, which she was not entitled to, and said that if anyone complained, she would tell them she was my driver. I smoothed my good wool coat. I held my purse with both hands. Inside it, the forged paper lay folded like a small, hot stone.
The branch manager was a young man named Mr. Dawson, with a rumpled tie and a sincere face. I asked to speak with him privately, and he led us into a glass office with a poster of a smiling family on the wall. I set the power of attorney on his desk. I said, “Young man, I would like you to tell me whether I came to this bank on the ninth of September and signed this paper before your notary.” He looked at the document. He looked at me. Then he looked at the stamp in the corner, and his smile slowly vanished.
He turned his computer screen toward us and clicked through a few menus. The notary journal, he explained, was kept by law, with a dated entry for every document stamped. The ninth of September showed three entries. A car title, a medical release, and a notarized statement. No power of attorney. Then he scrolled to the sixteenth. There it was, one line, written in the neat hand of the bank notary, Ms. Carla Benson. Gladys Hunt, power of attorney, identification verified by driver license. Under signature, in someone else scribble, were the words G. Hunt.
A listing sheet in a mailbox, a bank notary journal, and a woman at the senior center who won bingo twice.
“Mrs. Hunt,” said Mr. Dawson, very quietly, “on the sixteenth you were at the senior center. Is that right?” I told him I was there every Tuesday, from ten until three, and that sixty four people could swear to it, including the woman who called the numbers. He put his head in his hands for a moment. Then he picked up the telephone and asked Ms. Benson to come to his office. He did not say why. June squeezed my hand. In the corridor outside, I heard a pair of low heels click toward us, slowing as they came near the glass door.
Carla Benson was forty, plump and polished, with silver hoop earrings and a lanyard of keys. She came in smiling, saw the document on the desk, and her face fell like a curtain. She tried first to say that she could not remember. Then she tried to say that the customer had presented proper identification. Mr. Dawson asked, in a voice I would not have thought he had, whether the customer had been Gladys Hunt. Carla sat down heavily. She said, “It was her grandson. He said she was in the car with a bad hip. He had her license.”
I looked at Carla for a long time. I said that I had been a good customer of that bank for half a century, that I had brought cookies to every teller at Christmas, and that I had never once been asked to produce a license for a signature. She wept. She said that Tyler had been charming, and that he had told her I could not leave the car, and that she had gone out to the parking lot with her stamp and her journal and looked at a very old woman in the passenger seat. “That was not you,” she whispered. “That was his friend wearing a wig.”
I almost laughed. Then I thought of June, and of the glass office, and the bank policy poster, and I understood how close I had come. Mr. Dawson called the bank legal department. A woman there took notes for twenty minutes. By noon, the forged power of attorney had been voided, the notary stamp had been suspended, and the branch had filed a report with the county. Then Mr. Dawson walked us to the door himself. He said the bank was deeply sorry. He said, with real feeling, “Mrs. Hunt, I will make this right.”
I phoned Kim at the real estate office from June car. The listing had already been pulled. When I walked in my own front door, Tyler was awake at last, standing in the hall in his socks, with his phone in his hand and a gray face. He did not ask where I had been. He knew. He said, in a small, cracked voice, “Grandma, I owe forty one thousand dollars on a crypto account. I was going to pay everything back. I swear I was only going to borrow it.” I took off my coat, and hung it up, and said, “Sit down, Tyler.”
I did not call the police. I want to be honest about that, because June did not agree with me. I told Tyler that he had until Saturday to pack. I told him that he would meet with a counselor at the credit union, that he would take a job, even a humble one, and that he would repay the bank for any fees it had incurred. And I told him that if he ever forged my name again, I would call Detective Ruiz myself. He nodded. He had tears running down his chin. He said, “Grandma, why are you being so kind?”
I said it was not kindness. It was arithmetic. Harold had loved that boy, and I would not lose both of them to a stranger with a laser measuring tool. On Tuesday, June drove me to the senior center, as usual. I sat at my usual table with my daubers and my good luck troll, and when the caller read out B nine, I raised my hand and shouted bingo so loudly that the whole room turned. June hugged me. Across the room, the volunteer smiled. And in my purse, I carried a single new envelope, Tyler first twenty dollar repayment, with a note that read: Sorry, Grandma.