I read the clipping on the living room floor of my mother, with the late afternoon sun slanting across the carpet. The headline from 1998 said, FORMER NURSING HOME ADMINISTRATOR CHARGED IN DEED SCHEME, and under it was the photograph of a younger Mr. Collier, with the same very white teeth. He had run a facility outside Youngstown, Ohio. He had persuaded eleven residents to sign over their homes. He had pleaded to a lesser count, lost his license in Ohio, and then, evidently, moved quietly across the state line to start again.
Beneath the clipping lay a thick file of my father, in his neat block capitals. For thirty years Sal Marchetti had been an investigator for the district attorney of Erie County, and he had never learned how to stop. Three years ago, when my mother entered Lakeview Manor, he had looked up the name of the new administrator out of habit. He had found everything. At the bottom of the file was a letter addressed to me. “Jeannie,” it began. “If you are reading this, he has made his move. Do not sign anything. Call the number on the next page.”
The number belonged to Denise Lombardi, an agent in the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the Pennsylvania Attorney General in Harrisburg. I called her at home that same night. She listened for an hour. At the end she said, “Mrs. Marchetti, your father sent us a letter in his last year. We were waiting for someone with standing to come forward. Do you realize you may be the missing piece of a case we have been building for two years?” I sat back against the cold wall of the piano and put my hand over my mouth.
The people the world has stopped listening to are often the ones who have been listening to everything.
On Saturday I brought my mother home for the weekend, which Lakeview allowed with a signature. She sat at her own kitchen table in a pink cardigan, with a cup of tea, and I watched her face change. The vagueness left it like a curtain lifting. “Jeannie,” she said briskly, “I have been listening for three years. They talk in front of me as if I were furniture. Do you want to know what I know?” I got a pen. For two hours she dictated names, dates, and the exact words of conversations in the hallway, and I filled eleven pages.
She named three residents on the second floor whose houses had gone to the facility for care. A Mr. Pomeroy, a Mrs. Tran, and a Mrs. Eakin. She knew which notary came on Tuesdays and which aide was too frightened to talk. She knew that the balance of six thousand two hundred dollars on her own account was invented, because Medicare had never stopped paying, and she had heard Mr. Collier say so on the telephone. “He thinks I am a potted plant,” she said. “I let him think so. It is amazing what you learn.”
The agents came on Monday morning with a warrant, eight of them, in plain jackets. Mr. Collier was at his desk, eating a salad. When they told him why they had come, he stood up very quickly and knocked his water glass over, and his smile finally went away. In the filing cabinet behind his chair they found the three deeds, already prepared, with the names of the notary and the dates left blank. In the shredder basket, forty minutes of work still lay in strips, and a young agent began to sort them on the floor.
The trial was in the spring. Collier was convicted of theft by deception, elder financial exploitation, and billing fraud, and he was sentenced to nine years. The owners of Lakeview, a company in Cleveland, replaced the administrator and returned the three houses to their owners in full. My mother testified. At ninety four, in her good blue dress, she took the oath in a clear voice, looked at the jury, and said, “I have been called a vegetable for three years. I would like the record to reflect that I am a very well informed vegetable.” The courtroom laughed, and then it cheered.
She came home in June. I arranged an aide for the mornings and an adult day program on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I sold my own condominium to live in the house on Peach Street, in the room that used to be mine. It is not always easy. She is ninety four. She has good days and bad days, and some afternoons I am a stranger. But on the good days she is the sharpest woman in Erie, and she tells me every single thing she thinks of my cooking.
The three residents of the second floor came to visit us on a Sunday in July, with their families, and Mrs. Tran brought a tray of dumplings. Mr. Pomeroy, who is ninety one, stood in the living room for a long moment, looking at the piano. “Rose,” he said, “I owe you my house.” My mother waved a hand at him. “Nonsense, Arthur. You owe me a game of cribbage.” They played three rounds while the rest of us ate dumplings and cried and laughed.
In the evening, when the guests had gone, she asked me to help her to the piano. I lifted the bench lid just to show her the felt was still there, empty now, with the faint smell of old paper and my father. She sat down, put her thin fingers on the keys, and played the first bars of his favorite song, the one he used to hum while he shaved. Then she turned her head toward me, closed one eye, and smiled. And I knew he was somewhere nearby, listening.