Nineteen days after we buried my husband, my father let himself into our house with his new wife and told me to be gone by dark, because the $38,000 he’d put toward the down payment made the place his. “You were only ever a guest here, Shana.” I wouldn’t get off the couch, so he got me off it. Then I made a call from the steps.
I was thirty-four weeks along with the daughter Jonah had already picked a name for.
His work boots were still by the dryer where he’d kicked them off on a Thursday.
I hadn’t moved them. I couldn’t.
That Saturday I was on the couch with a laundry basket of his shirts, folding them into a box for his brother, when the deadbolt turned.
Nobody has a key to that house but me.
Except, it turned out, Dad.
He’d kept the spare I gave him four years ago so he could water my plants one Christmas.
Lyle Brooks came into the living room like a man there to read the meter. Ximena followed him in a cream sweater, carrying a tote bag and a coffee she’d picked up on the way.
She’s twenty-seven. At her bridal shower in March she spelled my name with two n’s on the place card.
“We need to talk about the house,” Dad said.
“Now?”
“Now works.” He laid a paper on the coffee table, square in front of me, and smoothed it with two fingers.
It was a quitclaim deed.
My name, typed, with a blank line under it. His name, typed, where the house would go.
“Jonah owed me thirty-eight thousand dollars,” he said. “That was a loan. He’s gone, so it’s due, and you don’t have it. This is how you pay.”
“That was a wedding present.”
“That was a LOAN.”
Ximena dug a little round stamp out of her tote and set it on the table beside the paper.
She works the front desk at a credit union. She’s a notary.
I’d forgotten that until right then.
“Just sign it, hon,” she said. “I’ll make it official. Takes two seconds.”
I looked at Dad.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“You’re thirty-one. Figure it out.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got a guy coming Monday about the roof.”
Something low in my belly pulled hard. I put a hand under it and waited.
“No,” I said.
“Shana.”
“I’m not signing ANYTHING. Get out of Jonah’s house.”
His face went flat.
I know that face. I grew up under it.
He came around the coffee table, and I tried to push up, but at thirty-four weeks you don’t stand fast off a soft couch. You roll. You brace.
He didn’t wait for the roll.
His hand went into my hair at the back of my head and closed.
The pain was white and total. I got both hands on his wrist and he pulled anyway, and I came off the cushions onto my knees on the rug, and then he was walking and I was going with him because my scalp was going with him.
“DAD. I’M PREGNANT.”
“I can see that, Shana.”
Jonah’s shirts went everywhere. One caught on my foot and came down the hallway with us.
Behind me Ximena said, “Oh my God, Lyle,” and laughed. A short one. The laugh you give a joke at dinner that went a little far.
He shouldered the storm door open and let go of me at the top of the steps.
I went down two of them on one hip and caught the rail.
Then it came back, lower and wider than before, and it didn’t pass.
I sat on the concrete with both arms around my belly and counted. It lasted almost a minute.
Dad tossed my phone out after me. It landed on the step by my shoe.
“Call your lawyer friend,” he said. “See what she tells you.”
The storm door clicked.
I did call her. Before anyone else.
Roseanne Vanderberg handled the closing when Jonah and I bought the place in Muncie.
She answered before it finished ringing once.
“Shana? Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry about Jonah, I kept meaning to call—”
“My dad’s in my house,” I said. “He pulled me out by my hair. I think I’m having contractions. He wants me to sign a quitclaim over the thirty-eight thousand.”
The line went quiet.
“Are you outside?”
“On the steps.”
“Stay there. You call an ambulance the second we hang up. But hear this first, because it matters.” I could hear her typing. “Your father phoned my office on Wednesday. He asked for a copy of your deed and the whole lender file from the closing.”
“Why would he want that?”
“I don’t know what he thought was in it. I know what is.” The typing stopped. “The bank wouldn’t let that money in as a loan, Shana. They made him sign a gift letter. He swore in writing that the thirty-eight thousand was a GIFT and he would NEVER ask for a dime of it back.”
I put my forehead on the cold rail.
“He doesn’t remember signing that,” I said.
“I’m looking at it. His signature’s on page two.”
Another one came. I rode it out with the phone pinned to my shoulder.
“One more thing,” Roseanne said. “He told my assistant he’d have your signature on a deed by the weekend. He didn’t say he’d ask you for it. He said he’d HAVE it.”
Through the living room window I could see the coffee table.
Ximena was kneeling at it.
She had the paper flat in front of her and a pen in her hand, and she was writing slowly, the way you write when you’re copying something off another page.
“Roseanne,” I said. “What happens if somebody signs my name for me?”
“Is somebody doing that right now?”
Ximena picked up the little round stamp and pressed it down on the page with both hands.
The front window
“Yes,” I said. “Ximena. She just stamped it.”
“Can you still see her?”
“She’s at the coffee table.”
“Then take a picture. Through the glass. Don’t knock, don’t go in. Take it and send it to me.”
I held the phone up to the window. The first one came out a cream smear and the corner of the table. I braced my wrist on the rail and took four more.
In the third one Ximena was looking straight at me.
She didn’t stop. She blew on the page like it was nail polish. Then Dad crossed the room and pulled the curtain shut.
“I sent them,” I said.
“Good. Now hang up and call 911. Tell them you’re pregnant before you tell them anything else.”
I did. A woman on the line had me time them against the clock on my phone while I sat on my own steps in my socks. Seven minutes apart. Then six.
Nobody came out of the house.
While I waited I opened the third picture and spread it with two fingers until the table filled the screen.
There were two sheets under Ximena’s hand. The deed, and beside it a page with a letterhead I knew. Vanderberg, closing attorney. Near the bottom of it, a signature in blue ink.
Mine. The S too big, because I was nervous that day.
How did my father have a page I signed in my lawyer’s office?
The VFW
The $38,000 came out at our rehearsal dinner, at the VFW on a Friday. Dad stood up with a beer and said Jonah and I weren’t going to rent our whole lives like he had, and that he’d put something toward a house. Everybody clapped. Jonah cried into his napkin.
I had never seen my father give anybody anything with an audience. I liked him more that night than I had in years.
At the closing, Roseanne slid a paper across to him and said the lender needed it signed. He read it with his glasses down his nose.
“Says here I’m never getting this back,” he said.
“That’s what a gift is, Lyle,” Roseanne said.
“Then I guess it’s a gift.” He signed and made a face at Jonah. “Bank wanted two months of my statements too. Like I’m some kind of crook.”
He complained about those statements through the whole lunch after.
I didn’t think about any of it again. I thought about the house. Two bedrooms, one maple, the dryer in a closet off the kitchen. Jonah painted the small bedroom yellow in the spring when we found out. He wanted to call her Julianna, after nobody. He just liked it.
My mother would have liked him. Mom died when I was fourteen, eleven months after the first appointment.
Near the end she told me there was money put by for me. “For a start, Shanie. A house, or school.” She said it more than once in the hospice bed, holding my wrist.
When I asked Dad about it at sixteen, he said it went to the funeral and the furnace. He said it like I’d asked him for a kidney. I didn’t ask again.
In the ambulance a paramedic with a ponytail strapped a band around my belly and looked at a screen.
“Who’s the man in the window?” she said.
He was standing between the curtains, watching them load me.
Room four
They kept me on the third floor overnight with a monitor across my belly and fluids in my arm. The nurse, Emiko, said the contractions were real, that a fall and not drinking enough and everything else could start them, and that the baby’s heart was doing what it should.
By ten that night they’d mostly stopped.
An officer had come at nine. Drew, his tag said. He’d already been to the house.
“Your father says you fell,” he said. “You got upset about some paperwork, went outside, slipped on the steps. His wife says the same.”
“He dragged me by my hair.”
“I’ve got two people telling me one thing and one telling me another, ma’am.”
I turned my head. Emiko had found a bare patch above my neck the size of a quarter. Officer Drew looked at it a while and wrote something down.
Then I showed him the pictures. He spread the third one the way I had.
“That’s your name?”
“I didn’t write it.”
“A forged document goes to the detectives. It’s in my report tonight. They’ll pick it up Monday.”
“Can you make them leave my house?”
He looked at his notepad. “They say you gave him a key and there’s a dispute over who owns it. I’m not putting a sixty-two-year-old man on the street tonight over that.”
Roseanne called after he left.
“I found out how he got your signature,” she said. “Karina, my assistant. He called Wednesday sounding like a nice old man helping his widowed daughter get her papers in order. She emailed him your signed mortgage pages before I ever saw the message. She’s in tears. It came out of my office, and I’m sorry.”
“So he has my signature.”
“He has a picture of it. We have a picture of her copying it.”
At eleven my brother-in-law texted. Callum had driven by for the box of shirts, the way we’d planned for that weekend.
It was a photo of my front door. A new brass deadbolt above the old knob, the price sticker still on it.
Kirby Avenue
Aunt Shea called at seven Sunday morning. She’s Dad’s older sister, the one who still puts a twenty in birthday cards for people over thirty.
“Your father says you fell,” she said.
“He pulled me out of my house by my hair.”
“Well, I wasn’t there.” She let that sit. “Honey, he’s in a spot.”
“What spot?”
“He didn’t tell you.” She sighed into the phone. “He sold the house, Shana. Kirby Avenue. In August. Ximena wanted something newer, the newer thing fell through, and the buyers had cash. They’ve been in her apartment since. The lease is up on the first.”
I had been in that house in July. I ate a hamburger on the back step while he grilled, and he didn’t say one word.
The pencil marks on the pantry door where Mom measured me. Her roses along the fence.
“Where’s the money from the sale?”
“I don’t ask my brother about his money. He gave you thirty-eight thousand dollars, and Jonah’s gone, and you’re going to be one woman with a baby in two bedrooms. Your father needs a roof. Sign the thing. He’ll let you have the little room till you’re on your feet.”
“He’s got a roofer coming Monday,” I said. “For my roof.”
“Somebody has to keep it up.”
Emiko came in, checked the strap and went out again.
“Aunt Shea. Did Mom ever tell you about money she put by for me?”
The line was quiet long enough that I checked the screen.
“Your mother told me a lot of things that last year,” she said. “Ask your father where Faye’s money went.”
She hung up.
At four that afternoon Roseanne emailed. No message, a subject line: Gift letter, complete lender file, every page.
It was nine pages.
Page four
I didn’t open it until after two in the morning. I was on my left side and the monitor lost the heartbeat every time I moved, and Emiko kept coming in to fix the strap.
Page one was the lender’s form. Page two was the letter, Jonah’s name and mine, the thirty-eight thousand, and a typed sentence: No repayment is expected or implied. Dad’s signature under it. Even his signature looks annoyed.
Page three was his driver’s license.
Page four was a bank statement. One of the two months he’d called himself a crook over.
It wasn’t his checking account.
The name in the box at the top said LYLE D BROOKS CUST FOR SHANA M BROOKS IN UTMA.
The address under it was Kirby Avenue. Opened March 2009. Mom died that May.
Beginning balance $38,412.06. One withdrawal, a cashier’s check for $38,000. Ending balance $412.06.
I typed UTMA into my phone with my thumb and read three different pages, because I didn’t believe the first one. An account an adult holds for a kid. In Indiana the money goes to the kid at twenty-one.
I was twenty-seven at the closing.
I did the math on the ceiling tiles, the way I do a grocery bill. Thirteen years he held it before that dinner. Six of them it was already mine by law. Then he stood up at the VFW with a beer and handed it to me, and everybody clapped.
And on Saturday he sat in my living room and called it a loan.
Emiko came in at three because the alarm went again.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I need to be out of here by nine.”
She looked at the monitor a long time. “If it stays like this, he’ll let you go. Bed rest. You don’t lift anything. You don’t go anywhere you’ll get upset.”
At 3:14 I texted my father.
I’ll be at my house at ten. Be there.
Ten o’clock
Callum drove. He’s Jonah’s younger brother, and he drives like Jonah did, both hands, under the limit. There was a lock set in a Lowe’s bag at my feet.
I’d called the non-emergency line from the hospital lot and asked for a standby. Officer Drew pulled up behind us.
A white van was in my driveway with a ladder on top. ARMANDO’S ROOFING. A man in a gray hoodie stood in the yard looking up at my shingles with a clipboard.
Dad opened my front door with the new key.
“You brought a cop to your father’s house,” he said.
“It’s her house, sir,” Officer Drew said.
“That’s what we’re settling.”
Ximena was on the couch where I’d been. Jonah’s shirts were in a pile on the recliner.
Dad didn’t sit down.
“She signed that deed Saturday, before she went out and fell. It’s notarized, it’s legal. She owes me thirty-eight thousand dollars and this is how she pays it. I’m the one paying for that roof. Jonah couldn’t have bought a doghouse without me. And now this, with her mother’s grandbaby in her.”
“Can I see the deed, ma’am?” Officer Drew said to Ximena.
She looked at Dad.
“Give it to him. It’s legal.”
She took it out of the tote. It was folded in thirds, a crease right through my name.
Officer Drew read it and held it out so I could see.
The line said Shanna Lenihan.
“How do you spell your first name, ma’am?”
“One n,” I said.
Ximena put her hand over her mouth.
“That’s sloppy, that’s all,” Dad said. “She signs sloppy.”
“I’ve got her signature on a hospital form from Saturday night, sir. One n.”
“Lyle,” Ximena said.
“Shut up, Ximena.”
“No. You said she’d sign once she saw it was fair. You said if she wouldn’t, it was your money anyway and I was only making it neat. You brought that page from the lawyer. You put it in front of me.” She turned to the officer. “I have a commission. I have a job. I’m not losing my job over his daughter’s house.”
Out in the yard the ladder banged the gutter.
I opened page four on my phone and handed it to Dad.
He held it out at arm’s length. His eyes went to the box at the top. Kirby Avenue.
He handed it back.
“That was your mother’s money,” he said.
“It says it was mine.”
“Your mother was my wife. What was hers was mine. I had a furnace go and a funeral to pay, and I didn’t touch it. I gave it to you, in front of everybody. And this is what I get, a cop in my living room and you and that lawyer going through my statements.”
“You told me it went to the funeral.”
“So you got it twice.” He laughed. Ximena’s laugh, the dinner one. “You’re welcome, Shana.”
Officer Drew asked me if I wanted to sign a complaint about Saturday.
Dad looked at me. I have known my whole life how long he waits before he decides for me.
“Yes,” I said.
“To your own father.”
“Yes.”
Officer Drew asked him to turn around. He did it in my living room, facing the wall, and said to the wall, “Who’s going to be there for that baby? Callum?”
Officer Drew held out his hand for the stamp. Ximena put it in his palm and stood there holding nothing.
At the door Dad said, “Shea won’t speak to you after this.”
On the steps the roofer looked at the cruiser and then at me.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You still want that estimate?”
The dryer
Julianna came on a Tuesday in November, seven pounds even. She has Jonah’s chin.
Callum put the new lock in the afternoon Dad was booked. Two keys. One on my ring, one in the drawer by the stove.
Roseanne is handling the rest. The detectives have the deed and the stamp. The state sent Ximena a letter about her commission. The account is a case now, and it will take longer than I want. I haven’t spoken to my father since he turned around in my living room. Aunt Shea sent nothing for the baby.
I drove past Kirby Avenue once. The roses are gone.
Saturday I folded Jonah’s shirts again on the couch with Julianna asleep on the cushion beside me. I kept one back, the blue one with the torn pocket. She sleeps on it.
Callum carried the box out to his truck and came back in for the boots by the dryer.
“Leave them,” I said.
If somebody in your family still has a key you gave them for one Christmas, this might be the week you ask for it back.
For more family betrayals involving old debts and money gone missing, read the father who arrived with a receipt from 1996, the brother who asked a widow for “her driver”, and the password that led to a $1.9 million wire.
