I read that page three times standing in the middle of the shop of Patsy with my rollers still in. I could not make my hands stop shaking. Patsy fetched me a paper cup of water and said, “Dr. Hollis Crane keeps an office out on Highway 71, Miss Lorene. Folks say he signs anything you put in front of him for a hundred dollars.” Then I understood the list. The bank would take my house. The doctor would say I was not right in my mind. Saturday was the day they meant to do it. I looked at the two words again. Those words were in the handwriting of Kaylin, the little loop she made on every I since second grade.
I drove home with the page on the seat beside me. Kaylin was at the kitchen table with her head in her arms, and Dustin was nowhere to be seen. I put the yellow paper in front of her and said nothing. She looked at it, and then she broke. “Grandma, I wanted to tell you for weeks.” Dustin had been giving her little white tablets and telling her they were vitamins for me. He said they would help me sleep. She started crushing them into my Sunday pills because he held her own pills over her head. She cried until I held her, and I held her, because she is mine.
I would be lying if I said I was not angry. I was shaking like a leaf. But I had been married to a furniture man for fifty years, and Cecil always said anger is for after, and a plan is for now. I called Sergeant Dale Whitfield, the nephew of my late husband at the Fort Smith police, and he came that night in plain clothes. He bagged the pill organizer for the lab. Then he asked Kaylin, gently, if she would help. She said yes before he finished the sentence. “I do not care what happens to me,” she whispered. “I just want him gone.”
A hairdresser warning led an eighty year old grandmother to expose a plot to steal her house, and the family healed.
Mrs. Pickett pulled my account while I sat there with my purse in my lap. In three weeks Dustin had called twice pretending to be me, tried to change my phone number and mailing address, and ordered a new box of checks sent to a post office box in Van Buren. She printed every record and put them in a folder with my name on it. “Mrs. Gaddis, nobody touches this account without me knowing,” she said. “And on Saturday, I will be in that room.” For the first time since Patsy turned off the dryer, I felt something under my feet. Cecil would have called it a good start.
The lab report came Friday morning. The tablets in my Sunday organizer were a strong sleeping medicine that had never been prescribed to me, enough to keep an eighty year old woman foggy, and then some. My own pharmacist Mr. Haskell wept when he read it. I also learned that the investor from Little Rock was the cousin of Dustin, Rudy, who had a house flipping business and two court judgments to his name. They planned to have me declared unfit on Saturday, sign my house over by afternoon, and sell it for two hundred forty thousand dollars before anyone asked a question.
On Saturday morning I put on my navy church dress and my pearls, and Patsy came over to do my hair at the kitchen table. Sergeant Whitfield taped a tiny recorder under my collar. Dustin was in the truck, grinning, and he held my door like a gentleman. “Big day, Granny,” he said. “Big day,” I answered. At the Garrison Avenue branch of my bank, the manager Mrs. Rhonda Pickett led us to a back office, where a notary Dustin had paid fifty dollars sat ready, with a stack of papers and a pen.
Dustin did the talking. He said I was forgetful, that I had wandered off twice, that I wanted to sign the house over to Kaylin for my own safety. He slid the pen to me. I took it, clicked it once, and said clearly, “Dustin, did you give me those sleeping tablets?” The room went quiet. He laughed. “Granny, you see? Confused.” Then the door opened, and Sergeant Whitfield walked in with two officers and Dr. Crane, who had been picked up in the parking lot with a signed letter in his pocket declaring me incompetent. Dustin went white as paper.
He tried to run, and he made it as far as the lobby, where a bank guard and a retired plumber waiting to cash his check tackled him next to the pamphlet rack. They charged him with elder exploitation, attempted fraud, and drugging a vulnerable adult. Rudy was arrested that afternoon at a diner on Rogers Avenue. Dr. Crane lost his license within the month. the judge set bond at one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and nobody paid it. I did not watch him go in the van. I was sitting on a bench outside, holding the hand of Kaylin.
Kaylin kept her word to the sergeant, and to me. She testified in October, every word steady, and the judge praised her courage from the bench. Then she checked herself into a treatment center in Fort Smith, ninety days, and I visited every Sunday with a pound cake. Dustin took a plea. Eight years. Patsy brought flowers to the house and cried in my kitchen. I told her she had saved my life, and she said, “Miss Lorene, thirty one years of Thursdays. I would never let you walk out of there without knowing.”
Kaylin came home the week before Christmas, clear eyed and thirty pounds heavier in the cheeks. This past Thursday at ten, I sat in my chair at the Beauty Nook of Patsy, with the same can of Aqua Net and the same rollers. In the next chair, my granddaughter sat wrapped in a smock, her first appointment in a year, grinning at me in the mirror. Patsy turned on the dryer, and I closed my eyes. I thought of Cecil, of the porch on North 41st Street, and how a woman is never truly alone if she has a good friend and a steady chair.