Three years ago I paid $38,400 so my mother wouldn’t lose her house at a tax sale, and this Christmas Eve she hung a stitched stocking for every grandchild on that mantel except my twelve-year-old stepson. “Stockings are for family, Kerry,” she said. So I went out to my car for the blue folder I keep the house papers in.
The county letter showed up in a yellow envelope in March, three years back.
After Dad died, Mom had just stopped paying the property taxes and told nobody.
Four years of them.
Penalties on top, then interest on the penalties, then a lien some company in Ohio had bought and wanted paid.
The house in Kokomo was going up for sale on a Tuesday in June.
Vijay and I had been saving for a bigger place for six years. I emptied it.
Vijay signed the transfer slip at our kitchen table and didn’t argue once.
“She’s your mom,” he said. That was the whole conversation.
The woman at the title office told me that if I was the one paying, the house should be in my name.
Mom signed the quitclaim without reading a word of it. She was crying too hard to read.
Then she went on living there, same as always. No rent.
I kept paying the insurance, $1,180 a year, and the new taxes every spring.
I never brought it up. Not at Easter. Not when she married Boyd and he parked his recliner in Dad’s spot by the window.
Ryker came with Vijay, two years before the yellow envelope. His mom lives in Phoenix and calls on birthdays.
He’s twelve now. Taller than me, all elbows, eats like a furnace.
Mom was polite to him.
Polite the way you are to the guy who reads the gas meter.
This year we drove up with a pecan pie and a present Ryker had made her himself at one of those paint-your-own pottery places at the mall.
A mug with a cardinal on it.
The cardinal looked like a tomato with legs. He was proud of it anyway.
The stockings were already up when we came in the door.
Red felt. White cuffs. Names stitched across the cuffs in green thread.
Danica’s three. Matt’s two. And one for Tristan, Boyd’s grandson, who is nineteen and has been to that house maybe four times.
Six.
Ryker’s lips moved while he counted them. Then he counted again.
He didn’t say a thing. He put the mug box under the tree, went and sat on the stairs, and took out his phone.
I found Mom in the kitchen with the baster in her hand.
“You forgot one,” I said.
She didn’t turn around. “I didn’t forget anything.”
“Ryker’s sitting on your stairs, Mom.”
“I know where he’s sitting.”
She set the baster on a folded paper towel and wiped her fingers on her apron, one at a time.
“Stockings are for the grandchildren, Kerry. The real ones. He has a grandmother in Arizona. She can make him one.”
The real ones.
Boyd was at the kitchen table with a can of beer and the newspaper. He turned a page he hadn’t read.
“He’s been here every Christmas for three years,” I said.
“And he’s welcome. As a GUEST.”
My ears went hot. I went back out to the living room and sat on the stairs next to Ryker, and he scooted over without looking up.
Dinner was at six.
Mom had done place cards, little folded ones with holly on them. Ryker had one. I’ll give her that.
Halfway through the ham, Zara put her fork down.
Danica’s middle one. Nine years old and she misses nothing.
“Grandma, where’s Ryker’s stocking?”
“Eat your potatoes, honey,” Mom said.
“But there’s no stocking for him. I counted.”
“Zara. Potatoes.”
Ryker set his fork across his plate.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not really hungry anyway.”
He got up, got his coat off the hook, and went out to sit in our car.
In December. In Indiana.
Vijay pushed his chair back. I put my hand on his arm.
“I’ve got this one,” I said.
I went out to the car. Ryker had his earbuds in and his hood up. I tapped on the glass and he lifted two fingers off his knee without turning his head.
So I opened the passenger door and leaned across him to the glove box.
The blue folder was right where it always is, under the ice scraper.
Insurance papers. Tax receipts going back three years. And the deed, recorded with the county, a raised stamp in the corner.
Grantee: Kerry Palacios.
I shut the glove box.
Ryker took one earbud out. “Are we leaving?”
“Not yet,” I said.
Back inside, nobody had touched their plates. I walked to the head of the table and set the folder down open, right next to the ham.
“What is that,” Mom said.
“Read the name on it.”
Matt leaned over first. “Kerry, what is this?”
Danica didn’t lean over. Danica knew. She’d driven me to the title office.
“It’s the deed to this house,” I said. “The house I paid THIRTY-EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS to keep you in.”
Mom’s hand went flat on the tablecloth.
“You told me that was a gift.”
“I told you I didn’t want it back. That’s not the same thing.”
“On Christmas Eve? In front of the children?”
“YOU DID IT FIRST, Mom. On the mantel. In green thread.”
Nobody picked up a fork. Zara looked from her grandma to me and back.
Mom turned in her chair toward Boyd, waiting for him to say something for her. He always did.
He folded the newspaper in half and set it beside his plate.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at her.
“Lois,” he said. “Tell her what you signed in March.”
Boyd’s newspaper
Mom didn’t tell me. She looked at her plate.
“Lois,” Boyd said again.
“It’s none of her business.”
“It’s her house. You just heard her.”
Then he turned to me. First time all night.
“She signed a will in March. At Al Zito’s office on Sycamore. Leaves this house to the kids on the mantel.”
Matt said, “What?”
“All six,” Boyd said. “Split even. Tristan too. I told her you can’t leave what you don’t own, and she said Zito would take care of that part.”
I looked past him through the doorway. From the head of the table you could see the mantel. Six red stockings in a row, and the empty space at the end where the fireplace screen was.
Mom hasn’t driven anywhere past the Kroger since Dad died. Boyd’s truck has a stick shift and she won’t touch it.
Sycamore is clear across town.
“Who drove you to Zito’s, Mom?”
She picked up her fork. She put it down again.
Boyd took a drink of his beer.
“Wasn’t me,” he said. “I told her I wouldn’t.”
Janis
The title office was in a strip mall on the south side, between a nail place and a vacuum repair shop with a sign in the window that said WE FIX ALL KIRBYS.
Danica drove us in her minivan. Three car seats in the back back then, Cheerios in all of them.
Mom sat in the middle row with her purse on her lap and a wad of tissues in each fist.
The woman at the desk was named Janis. Reading glasses on a chain, a cardigan with a pumpkin pin even though it was March.
She had the quitclaim on a clipboard, and she read it out loud. All of it. Every line, the legal description, the lot number, the part about the county.
Then she put the clipboard down and looked at my mother.
“Lois, do you understand this gives the house to Kerry?”
Mom nodded and kept crying.
“I need you to say it, hon.”
“Yes. She’s paying for it. She should have it.”
Danica was holding Mom’s purse by then so Mom could sign.
Janis said Indiana didn’t need a witness on a quitclaim but she liked to have one anyway, because families. So Danica signed the witness line at the bottom.
She wrote the date next to it. 3/17. She crosses her sevens. She has since fourth grade, when a teacher told her she wrote them like ones.
Danica puts her mark on everything. She has a sewing machine with a little screen on it, and she stitches names on the kids’ backpacks, their towels for swim lessons, Matt’s bowling shirt the year he joined a league. Green thread is her favorite. It shows up on anything.
Out in the parking lot Mom stopped by the minivan door.
“Can I still live there?”
“Till they carry you out, Mom,” I said.
She hugged me in front of the vacuum place.
On the drive home Danica kept her eyes on the road. They were in a two-bedroom duplex then. Three kids in one room, a bunk bed and a crib.
“You’d never sell it, though,” she said. “Right?”
“No.”
“Okay. I just wanted to hear it.”
Every April after that I drove up with the tax receipt from the treasurer’s office and set it on Mom’s kitchen table so she’d know it was paid.
She’d look at it and say, “All right.”
That was all she ever said about it. Three Aprils.
Now Danica sat across the table from me cutting Zara’s ham into squares, and Zara is nine.
Boyd pushed his chair back and went to the hutch.
The hutch drawer
He pulled out the bottom drawer, the one with the good napkins, and came back with a manila envelope.
ZITO & PAPADAKIS, ATTORNEYS AT LAW was printed in the corner.
“Boyd,” Mom said. “You put that back.”
He set it on top of my deed.
I opened it. The will was on top, four pages, stapled.
I give my residence and all contents to my grandchildren, in equal shares.
Then the names. The same six. The same order as the mantel, left to right, Danica’s three first and Tristan last.
At the bottom of page two: I name my daughter, Danica, as executor.
Matt read it upside down. Then he sat back.
“Kerry. It’s a will. She can put what she wants in a will. Can we please eat?”
His two were on it. His oldest was reaching for a roll.
“Your father and I paid this house off in 1998,” Mom said. “I raised four children in it. I mean three. Your father’s brother lived in the basement for a year, I count him. I was a widow eight months when you came up here with your checkbook. Eight months. I couldn’t find my own car keys. And you sat me down in front of a stranger and I signed whatever she put in front of me, and then you took it and put it in your glove box like a parking ticket.”
“You can’t leave a house you don’t own, Mom.”
“That’s exactly what Mr. Zito said.”
She reached over, took the will off the pile, and turned it face down.
“That’s why I signed the other one.”
The next page in the envelope said AFFIDAVIT OF LOIS M. SWEENEY. Under that, in capitals: UNDER DURESS.
The sewing room
It was two pages. Somebody had typed it for her, because Mom doesn’t talk like this.
I was not told what I was signing. I believed I was signing a paper for the tax company. My daughter Kerry did not explain the document to me. I was in a state of grief and was not able to read.
Notarized. A purple stamp with Zito’s secretary’s name on it.
“Janis read it to you,” I said. “Out loud. Every word. She asked you for a yes and you gave her one.”
“I don’t know any Janis.”
“Pumpkin pin. In March.”
“I don’t remember a pin, Kerry. I don’t remember any of that day, and that’s the point.”
I turned to my sister.
“Dani. You were there. Tell her.”
Danica put the knife down next to Zara’s plate. She lined it up with the edge of the plate.
“She was a mess, Kerry. You remember how she was.”
That’s not a yes. I sat there and waited for the rest of it and there wasn’t any.
Then Zara said, “Is this about the move?”
“Zara,” Danica said.
“Mom said when we move in at Grandma’s I get the sewing room. Because it has the window seat. And Kaden and Bree have to share.”
Matt put his roll down.
“You’re moving in here?”
“Our lease is up January thirty-first,” Danica said. “The landlord’s selling the duplex. You knew that, Matt, I told you at Thanksgiving.”
“You didn’t tell me you were moving in with Mom.”
“Somebody has to be here with her,” Mom said. “Danica’s the one who comes. Danica’s the one who drives me to the doctor. Danica made those stockings, all six in one night on her machine, so the kids would have something nice. Danica takes care of me.”
I looked at my sister. She looked at the ham.
“When were you going to tell me?” I said.
“It’s Mom’s house, Kerry. Everybody at this table knows it’s Mom’s house.”
Three-seventeen
There was one more page in the envelope. Shorter. Half a page, with a line for a signature and a line for a notary.
STATEMENT OF WITNESS.
I, Danica, drove my mother Lois Sweeney to the title office on the day she signed the deed. I was present the entire time. My mother was crying throughout and no one read or explained the document to her.
Signed in blue pen, the D with the big loop on it. Dated 3/7. The seven had a line through it.
I opened my blue folder and took the deed out. I laid it next to Zito’s page, on the tablecloth, between the gravy and the place card with Ryker’s name on it.
Down at the bottom of the deed, on the witness line: the same big loop on the D. The same blue pen, or close to it. 3/17, and the seven crossed.
“Matt,” I said. “Read both of those.”
He pulled them over. He read the deed. He read the statement. He read the deed again, and his lips moved the same way Ryker’s had.
“Dani,” he said. “You signed both of these.”
Danica didn’t reach for them.
“Zito said the witness line doesn’t even count in Indiana. He said it’s a formality. Anybody could have signed it.”
“You were holding her purse,” I said.
Zara looked at her mom.
Mom was looking at Danica too now. Her hand was still flat on the tablecloth where she’d put it when I came in with the folder.
“You told me Kerry would never fight it,” Mom said. “You told me she’d be too embarrassed.”
“I told you what Zito told me.”
“You told me you’d do the stockings the way I said.”
“I did them the way you said.”
Boyd picked up his newspaper and put it down again without opening it.
Danica pushed the statement back across the cloth toward me with one finger.
“It was just for the file. Nobody was ever supposed to see that one.”
Eleven hundred a month
Mom found her voice before anybody else did. She always does.
“Don’t you look at your sister like that. She did what I asked her to do. I’m the one who went to Mr. Zito. I’m the one who wanted it fixed, and I’d sign it again tomorrow, so you can put that in your folder too.”
“Lois,” Boyd said.
“No. She came in here with her papers in front of the children. She can hear it.”
She pointed down the table at the mantel.
“You want to know about the stocking? Every April you drive up here. Every April. You put a piece of paper on my table and you stand there. ‘Here, Mom. It’s paid.’ And you wait till I say all right. Three years I’ve been saying all right in my own kitchen to my own daughter like I’m behind on the rent.”
“I just wanted you to know it was done.”
“I KNEW it was done. You made sure I knew.”
Boyd set his can down. “Tristan’s not your blood either, Lois.”
“Tristan’s grandpa doesn’t bring me a receipt.”
Nobody said anything after that. Zara had her hands in her lap.
So that was the stocking. It was never about Ryker. Ryker was just the one of mine she could reach.
I put the will back in Zito’s envelope. Then I put Danica’s statement in my blue folder, behind the deed, and closed it.
“You stay, Mom,” I said. “Till they carry you out. I said it at Janis’s and I meant it.”
“Don’t you DARE talk to me like it’s yours to say.”
“Danica can move in February first. She’ll sign a lease with me. Eleven hundred a month. Same as the duplex.”
Danica’s face went blotchy, the way it does.
“You’d charge your own sister rent? To live with our mother?”
“Or you can find another place.”
“With three kids? In a month?”
“Then sign the lease, Dani.”
“In MY house,” Mom said. “You’d put a lease on my table in my house on Christmas Eve. Your father would be sick. He’d be sick to his stomach, Kerry, and you know it, and you don’t care, because you’ve got your stamp and your folder and you’ve got your…”
She didn’t finish. She was looking at Vijay.
Vijay was already up. He had my coat off the hook and he held it open for me.
Matt didn’t look at me. He told his oldest to put the roll down.
Danica said, “Don’t call me, Kerry. I mean it. Don’t call.”
I picked up the folder.
On the way out I stopped at the tree. Ryker’s box was still under it, wrapped in the paper with the snowmen, a tag on it in his handwriting. To Grandma Lois. Grandma spelled with one m and fixed.
I left it there.
Outside it was snowing a little, the dry kind that blows. Ryker had the car running and the heat up. He took out an earbud when I got in.
“Are we leaving?”
“Now we are,” I said.
April
The second Saturday in April I drove up to Kokomo with the tax receipt, same as always.
Danica’s minivan was in the driveway. The car seats are gone. There’s a booster for Bree and a soccer bag on the floor.
Her checks come in the mail on the first. Eleven hundred, every month, never late, nothing on the memo line. Not one phone call with them. Vijay deposits them into a savings account we opened in January with Ryker’s name on it.
We’re still in the apartment. The bigger place is six more years, maybe five now.
Mom hasn’t called on a Sunday since Christmas.
She was in the kitchen when I came in, same apron. I set the receipt on the table where I always set it.
She looked at it a while.
“All right,” she said.
Out in the living room the stockings were packed away. On the windowsill by Boyd’s recliner there was a mug with a cardinal on it, full of pens.
There were seven brass hooks on the mantel now. The one at the end was newer than the others, and it was screwed in a little crooked.
I counted them twice, the way Ryker did, and then I went out to the car.
If you’ve ever been the one who pays and still gets told what you’re not, hug the kid in your house who counted something tonight.
Family loyalties can get complicated in ways that leave lasting marks – read “I Was Nine, She Was In Room 14” and the story of a father-in-law who tampered with his son-in-law’s antibiotics. For another tale of sacrifice and betrayal, see the truck bought with eleven years of Saturday shifts.
