I did not know. That was the truth, and I told it. “I have no idea who is in his truck,” I said, “and I have no idea why she would need a seal.” The guard, whose badge read Ortiz, looked at me for a long moment and then at the papers again. Power of Attorney, they said across the top, in ugly bold type, with my name typed in the first line and a signature at the bottom that looked something like mine, if I had been drunk. At the very end, a notary block waited, blank except for a line that said, to be completed in the presence of the principal. Travis had meant to have it stamped in my room, at midnight, whether I agreed or not.
Ortiz called it in without taking his eyes off Travis. Within three minutes there were two Kingman police officers in the doorway, and a night supervisor in a cardigan, and the hallway outside my room was full of curious faces in paper slippers. Travis tried the polite voice again. “Gentlemen, there has been a misunderstanding. I only wanted to help my mother with her finances.” One of the officers, a young woman with a long braid, picked the pillows up from the floor, one at a time, and set them on the bed. “Sir,” she said, “you have a hand mark on her cheek. Please step into the hall.”
They found the woman in the truck within ten minutes. Her name was Cheryl Dunn, fifty four years old, a mobile notary from Lake Havasu who advertised on the backs of grocery carts. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her seal in her lap, a thermos of coffee, and a book of crossword puzzles, in the lamplight of the parking garage. Travis had paid her three hundred dollars in cash to come to the hospital at midnight and stamp a paper for his elderly mother, who could not sign for herself. Cheryl Dunn had done it a hundred times. She had never before been asked to stamp in a hospital room while a man held a woman up by her shoulders.
A notary with a seal in a parked truck proved what a mother had always known and was finally ready to say out loud.
She cried in the interview room, they told me afterward, and she cooperated in full. She said that Travis had told her I was confused and willing. She said she had not wanted to look closely. Her commission was suspended on the spot, and in March the state revoked it altogether, and she wrote me a short, shaky letter in blue ink that said only, “Mrs. Halloway, I am sorry. I should have asked to speak with you.” I read it three times on the porch. I forgave her before I finished the first page.
There are people who do wrong out of malice, and people who do wrong out of habit, and Cheryl was the second kind. It is a smaller sin, but it still needs a name.
Travis was booked at three in the morning. The charges were assault, attempted fraud on a vulnerable adult, and conspiracy. In the quiet of the cell, a sergeant told me later, he asked only one question. “Does my mother know that I did not mean it?” The sergeant said he did not know. I would have said the same. Because the truth, which I had avoided for twenty years, was that Travis had meant every single thing. He had meant it the day he sold the piano I paid for, and the day he took my debit card, and the night he lifted me from the bed. A child who learns that nobody will stop him does not stop himself.
My sister Lorraine drove four hours from Flagstaff the next morning. She brought a quilt, a bag of oranges, and a lawyer, a plain, tidy woman named Mrs. Okafor, who spent two hours at my bedside with a legal pad and the patience of a saint. By noon, I had signed three papers, and each one was a good one: a protective order, a revocation of every power of attorney I had ever granted, and a new account in my own name, at a bank across town, with a password that Travis could not guess. Lorraine looked at me when it was done. “Peg,” she said, “that is the first time in thirty years I have seen you do something for yourself.”
Travis wrote me from the county jail in December. I did not open the letter for a week. When I did, it was two pages long and mostly excuses, but at the bottom was a sentence that was not. I do not know how to be a person who does not take, it said. I wrote back one line. Then learn. He pleaded guilty in January, and the judge, an old woman who had clearly raised sons, gave him three years, with a treatment program and restitution. I did not go to the hearing. I did not need to see it. I had seen enough of that room.
I spent nine weeks learning to walk again. The physical therapist was a bearded giant named Lamar who sang Motown while he worked, and the first day I stood on my own, in the parallel bars, he sang “My Girl” at the top of his lungs. By March I had a cane. By May I had a garden. The mail carrier who had found me at the foot of the steps, a woman named Dolores, brought me a pie on the day I came home, and she cried when she saw me at the screen door. “I have thought of you every single day,” she said. I told her that I had thought of her, too.
We rebuilt the porch steps that summer. The men from the church did it in one Saturday, with a ramp on one side and a good strong rail on the other, and a brass plate by the door that reads Walt and Peg, 1971. The photograph from the hospital wall stands on my mantel now, the two of us squinting in the desert sun, so young. I turned it over last week and read his faded ink again. Take care of yourself, Peg. I said it aloud, to the quiet house, and to the boy who had once climbed these steps with a lunch pail. I said, “I am. I finally am.”