“…was Dolores Hatch,” Ms. Keating said quietly, and she placed her finger beside the witness line without touching the ink. I sat in her narrow office in downtown Wichita, with my late husband Henry treadle sewing machine on the chair beside me, wrapped in a bath towel, and I read the name once, slowly, and then again. Dolores had lived next door to me for thirty six years. She had watered my tomatoes when I was in the hospital. She had held my hand at Henry service. Only four days before, she had stood in my kitchen, drinking coffee, asking if I needed anything from the store.
Ms. Keating was a slim woman of fifty five with a gray bob and a calm, exact way of speaking. She said that the deed transfer in the sewing machine panel would have given my nephew Kevin full ownership of my house on Elm Street, free of any claim from me, for a sum of one dollar. It had been drafted by an online service and never filed, because the second form, the one with the wrong date, had been rejected by the county clerk. Dolores had not understood what she was witnessing. Kevin had told her it was a routine update for the property tax rolls.
Henry note lay between us on the desk, written in his compact slanting hand on the back of a sewing pattern envelope. Irene, if you are reading this, you have opened the old machine, which means someone has gone through my things. Do not sign anything Kevin gives you. He is a sweet talker, and I have seen him do it to others. Call Ms. Keating. She helped my brother. Do not blame the neighbors. People are easily fooled by a young man who smiles. Now go have a cup of tea. Everything is going to be all right. Henry.
A loose panel in a treadle sewing machine, a one dollar deed transfer, and a neighbor name on the witness line.
I walked home, the six blocks from the law office, in a thin, bright wind, with the machine in my arms and a feeling like a stone in my chest. I did not go to my front door. I went across the strip of lawn to Dolores porch and rang her bell. She opened it in her blue housecoat, with her glasses pushed up on her head, and when she saw the bundle in my arms, she knew. Her eyes filled. She said, “Oh, Irene,” and she stepped aside, and I walked into her kitchen, which smelled of lemon polish and burned toast.
She told me everything while the kettle boiled. Kevin had visited her on a Friday, with a clipboard and a brisk, charming manner. He had said that I was getting forgetful and that the house taxes were behind, and that I had asked him to handle a small form so that nobody would be upset. He had said he needed a neighbor to confirm my signature. She had signed, believing she was helping an old friend. Only afterward had a small voice told her that she had not seen me sign anything at all. She had not been able to look at me since.
I did not scold her. I could not. I had known her too long. I took her hands, which were cold and spotted, and I said that Kevin could charm a bird off a branch, and that I had nearly signed his papers myself more than once. I said the only thing that mattered now was to stop it. She nodded, and wiped her face with a dish towel, and said she would give a sworn statement. She also said, in a small voice, that she would understand if I never wanted to speak to her again.
I told her that I wanted her to come to supper on Sunday. I had a roast, and she liked my gravy. She stared at me for a long moment, and then she began to laugh, and then to cry again, all at once, the way old women do when their hearts have been lifted off a hook. We sat in her kitchen with our tea until the light turned orange in the window, and she asked me what I intended to do about Kevin. I said I intended to speak to him as an aunt, not an enemy.
Kevin arrived on Saturday morning in his white pickup, whistling. He stopped on my front walk when he saw the sewing machine on the porch table, uncovered, with the panel open and the deed beside it. He was thirty nine, handsome, restless, a man who had been in and out of five different businesses. I asked him to sit. I told him I knew about the clipboard, the neighbor, the one dollar. I said I had spoken to Ms. Keating. He stared at me, and the whistle faded, and I saw what was under it, which was fear.
He told me that he had a partner in a car lot venture, that it had collapsed, that he owed thirty thousand dollars to people who did not send letters. He had looked at the house and seen a way out. He said it had felt like borrowing from family. I said it was not borrowing if you did not ask. I told him I would help him, but only through Ms. Keating, only with every payment documented, and only if he entered a plan to repay in small monthly checks. He agreed to all of it. His voice shook.
That spring, Kevin fixed the fence at my back yard, board by board, with no payment, and painted the porch steps. Dolores came to supper every Sunday. In April, I took the old sewing machine to a shop in Delano, where a man with thick spectacles cleaned and oiled it and replaced the panel with a new one of matching oak. When I brought it home and pressed the treadle, it purred, steady and low. I made a pillowcase, then a dress for Dolores granddaughter, then a quilt, and the little machine sang the whole time.