The papers were in the water heater closet, folded small, behind a box of rat traps. Nana Pearl had remembered the exact spot, because Duane had hidden them there himself the morning after she signed. I found them on my second search, with Ms. Okafor holding the flashlight, and carried them up the stairs into the kitchen, where the light was good. They were a quitclaim deed, three pages long, conveying the house at 214 Cypress Lane, Chesapeake, to Crystal and Duane Reese, jointly, for the sum of one dollar. At the bottom of the third page was my signature.
It was not my signature. I looked at it for a long time. It was a decent copy, upright and neat, the kind of thing a person could produce after studying a signature on a reenlistment form. But my name has a small hook on the T that I have had since the seventh grade, and this one did not. There was also the notary stamp, a name I did not know, a date in August when my ship was in the Mediterranean, and a witness line signed by a woman named Brenda Sloan. I laid the page flat on the counter.
Ms. Okafor read it over my shoulder. She was a tall unhurried woman in a tweed jacket, and she had a way of reading that made you feel the truth of a document pass through her. She said, “Petty Officer, this is a felony.” I said that I knew. She said, “You need to call the Commonwealth Attorney. And you need to call the JAG officer. I will send an investigator to the pawnshop.” She glanced toward the bedroom door. “And I think you should sit with your grandmother. She is asking for you.”
A ring left at a pawnshop can be taken back by a man who loves his grandmother, but the love that did not find its way home must be waited for.
I went in. Nana was propped on my pillows with a bowl of oatmeal on her lap, and she patted the quilt beside her. I sat down. She said, “Baby, I am so sorry. I did not know what I was signing. Your mama said it was for the Medicaid.” I took her hand. It was still cold, though the room was warm. I said, “Nana, you did nothing wrong. You trusted your daughter.” She said, “I wanted to.” She looked out the window. “I wanted to so much that I did not ask.” I did not know how to answer. We sat in the quiet until the oatmeal was gone.
The lawyer on base was a lieutenant commander named Whitaker, a brisk freckled man who had grown up in Chesapeake himself. He took the deed in a plastic sleeve. He was on the telephone to the county clerk within the hour, and by the end of the week the transfer had been voided as forgery, the recording struck from the register, and an injunction filed against the sale of the property. The house was mine again. He said, “You were lucky you came home early, Petty Officer. In another month, they would have sold it.” I said I knew.
They found Crystal in a motel in Suffolk, three days later, with Duane and the car I had paid off for her. The deputy who arrested them said she had not even tried to run. She had just sat on the bed, with her purse in her lap, and wept. She was charged with forgery, with elder neglect, and with theft of medication. Duane was charged with the same, and with filing a false notarization. The pawnshop owner turned over the ring of my grandmother without being asked. It had not been sold. He had held it, he said, because he had seen the age on the ticket.
I went to see my mother at the county jail. I had not planned to. I stood in the visitor line in my dress whites because I did not know what else to wear. She came out in an orange jumpsuit, with her hair undone, and sat on the other side of the glass. She did not look at me. She said, in a tiny voice, “Tyler, I was so tired.” She said she had been tired since the age of seventeen. She said Duane had told her it was only temporary, only until the house was sold, and that there would be money for all of them.
I told her I did not hate her. It was the truth, though it surprised me. I said, “Mama, you could have asked me for help.” She began to cry. “You were never home.” I said, “I was working to give you a home.” She put her face in her hands. We sat for twenty minutes and did not say another word. When I stood, she looked up and said, “Is Mama all right?” I told her that Nana was eating, and sleeping, and that she had asked about her every day.
The judge took all of that into account. My mother pleaded guilty. She received eighteen months, with a program of treatment, and probation after. Duane received four years. Nana wrote a letter to the court in her careful church hand, and I read it aloud at the sentencing. It said, I forgive my daughter. I do not excuse her. I ask only that she be given the chance to become what I raised her to be. When the judge finished reading it, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
I put in for shore duty that winter, and the Navy, to my relief, approved it. I moved Nana into the best bedroom in the house, the one with the window onto the maple tree, and she sleeps now under a quilt she made in 1974. On her birthday in March, we had a party with forty people, with Little League coaches and old cafeteria ladies and every sailor in my squadron. I held up a sign that said THAT IS MY NANA. She cried through the whole song. And on her finger, once more, was the ring.