My boyfriend’s mother lifted my six-week-old daughter off my shoulder for her fortieth anniversary photo, pointed me out of the line and said, “Blood only, sweetheart. You can take it.” So I took it, on her phone. Four minutes later she came running back across the lawn, white as the tablecloth, for what had lit up in my hand.
Nine years I’d been with Jarrod.
Nine Christmases at that house, nine of Beverly’s birthdays, and one granddaughter she’d described to her bridge club as “probably his.”
Anika was the first grandchild on either side.
That was supposed to count for something.
Moses and Beverly Petersen had been married forty years that Saturday, and Beverly had rented chairs for it.
Sixty white folding chairs, in an Owensboro backyard that seats maybe twenty.
Moses had been slipping since spring.
He called Lev by Jarrod’s name, left the truck running outside the pharmacy, asked me twice at one dinner what I did for work.
By June Beverly had his power of attorney. She brought it up a lot.
The Christmas before, when he was still mostly himself, Moses had walked me out to the porch his father poured and tapped the top step with his boot.
“This goes to the boys,” he said. “And whoever the boys bring.”
I’d thought that meant me.
The photo was at three.
Beverly lined everybody up under the maple: Moses in the middle in his good blue shirt, Lev and Tram on the left, Jarrod on the right, two aunts, three cousins, and the neighbor who’d brought the potato salad.
Tram had married Lev two years ago. She got the spot next to Beverly.
I stepped in beside Jarrod with Anika on my shoulder.
Beverly looked at me like a chair somebody had put in the wrong row.
“Oh, no, hon. Give her to Jarrod.”
So I handed my daughter over, and Jarrod tucked her against his chest, and I went back to standing beside him.
“Blood only, sweetheart,” Beverly said. “You can take it.”
She held her phone out at me. Pink case, cracked across one corner.
Jarrod said, “Mom.”
That was the whole sentence. Then he looked at the grass.
Moses started to say something and Beverly laid her hand flat on his arm. “Smile, Moses. We’re doing the picture.”
I backed up onto the patio.
Eleven people and my daughter in the frame, and me behind the glass.
“Three, two, one.”
“Again,” Beverly said. “Your thumb’s in it.”
My thumb was not in it.
I took four more. She didn’t look at a single one. She said “Lovely” to nobody, walked off toward the cake table with Tram, and the whole line came apart like a fire drill had ended.
I stood there with her phone.
On the other side of the fence the neighbor’s sprinkler was going, and every few seconds it hit the boards.
The screen went dark in my hand.
Then it lit up.
A text, and the preview held all of it.
Delano Wilkins: title company moved closing to Fri 9am. Moses doesn’t sign anything, your POA covers it. Once it’s in your name you’re free, Bev. Don’t let the boys see before.
I read it twice.
Then a third time, slow, the way you read a bill you think is wrong.
Closing.
On the house I was standing in front of. The porch his father poured. The yard with sixty rented chairs on it.
Before Friday. Before Moses could forget it, or remember it.
I had no idea who Delano Wilkins was.
I knew he called her Bev, and nobody called her Bev. Not even her husband of forty years.
Across the yard Beverly was cutting the cake.
She had the server in one hand, and with the other she reached for her back pocket. Patted it. Patted it again.
Then she turned around and looked straight at me.
I have never seen the color go out of a face that fast.
She dropped the server on the paper tablecloth, frosting and all, and she ran.
Sixty-three years old, in wedge sandals, across the grass and through the middle of her own rented chairs.
“Give me my phone.”
“You told me to take it,” I said.
“ANGELICA. GIVE IT TO ME. RIGHT NOW.”
The whole yard heard that one. Tram stopped dead with a plate in each hand.
Jarrod came up the patio steps with Anika still on his chest. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. It’s mine. It’s private.”
She grabbed for it, and my arm went back before I’d decided anything.
“Is something wrong with the picture?” Jarrod said.
“The picture is FINE.”
Her hand closed around my wrist. Her nails were the same pink as the case.
“You are not family,” she said, low enough that only I could hear. “You don’t get to read my things.”
“I didn’t read anything,” I said.
It was the first lie I’d ever told that woman.
Then Moses was at the bottom of the steps, squinting up at the three of us in his good blue shirt.
“Beverly? Why are you running?”
Nobody answered him.
He held his hand out. Not to her. To me.
“Angie,” he said. “Let me see how we came out.”
Beverly’s fingers dug in.
And the phone lit up again between us.
The second text
It was Delano again.
Delano Wilkins: And delete these. Mean it this time.
Mean it this time. So there had been other times.
Beverly read it upside down off my palm. I know she did, because her nails let go of my wrist and went for the phone instead. I turned my shoulder, swiped the text off the screen with my thumb and opened her pictures.
The last one I’d taken was right on top. Eleven people under the maple. Anika asleep on Jarrod’s chest with her mouth open.
I came down two steps and held it out to Moses.
“Here,” I said. “This is how you came out.”
He took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on and looked at it for a long time. Beverly stood one step above us, breathing like she’d run a mile, which she sort of had.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “Where are you?”
Nobody said anything to that either.
“Angie took it, Moses.” Beverly reached past me and lifted the phone out of my hand, gentle now, with half the yard watching. “She’s the photographer.”
She put it in her back pocket and buttoned the pocket.
Then she went back to the cake table, picked the server up off the tablecloth and licked the frosting off her thumb.
Moses didn’t follow her. He folded his glasses and put them away, and he leaned in close to me like we were talking about the weather.
“Is the doctor Friday or Saturday?” he said. “She told me. I lost it.”
The growth scan
In June, Jarrod was working second shift at the distillery, and the doctor’s office only had mornings.
So Moses drove me to my thirty-week scan.
Beverly set it up. She said he needed something to do with his hands besides the remote, and he’d been driving fine on short trips, and a man who couldn’t take his own grandbaby’s mother to a doctor’s appointment was a man she’d have to start worrying about.
He wore a ball cap from a seed company that went out of business in 1990. He sat in the waiting room with a Field and Stream older than me, and when the tech said the dad could come back for the pictures, he stood up before I could say he wasn’t the dad.
He watched the screen with his mouth a little open.
“That’s a girl,” the tech said.
“I know it,” Moses said. He did not know it. Nobody did.
He asked for a printout. The tech gave him two, the long glossy strip with the date and time in the corner the way they always print, and he folded one in half and put it in his wallet behind his driver’s license.
On the way home we stopped at the pharmacy. He went in for his blood pressure pills and came out the side door and walked half a block toward the river before he turned around and saw the truck idling at the curb, me in it, hazards going.
He got back in and didn’t say anything.
Then he took a little spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket. Beverly had bought him a three-pack in April, “so you’ll quit asking me.” He wrote something in it with the pencil from the cup holder and put it away.
“What is it you do, Angie?” he said, pulling out. “You told me.”
“I record deeds,” I said. “County clerk’s office. Land records.”
“That’s right.” He nodded at the windshield. “So this house is in there.”
“Your dad bought the lot in 1958,” I said. “I looked it up once. I’m nosy.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, the old one.
That night at dinner Beverly told the table she’d had to take over everything. She’d been to the lawyer. She had the paper. Anything about Moses came through her now. She said it to Lev, and she said it to the aunt on the phone, and she said it to me while she passed the corn.
Jarrod said, “Good, Mom. That’s good.”
He’d been looking at houses that summer. Late at night, phone over his face in bed. A three-bedroom out by the bypass with a fenced yard, and a number at the bottom we didn’t have: thirty thousand down.
“Someday,” he’d say, and lock the phone.
So that was where we were when Moses leaned in at the patio steps and asked me about a doctor.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
Jarrod did. He came down the steps with Anika and touched his dad’s shoulder.
“Friday, Dad. Mom’s driving you.”
Jarrod’s truck
We left before the cake was gone. Jarrod drove. Anika slept in her seat in the back with one fist up by her ear.
I waited until we were past the Kroger.
“Who’s Delano Wilkins?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Why?”
“Because he texted your mom about a closing on your dad’s house. Friday at nine. And he said not to let the boys see.”
He was quiet for a whole stoplight.
“You read her phone.”
“She handed me her phone, Jarrod.”
“He’s the title guy,” he said. “Mom’s refinancing. Dad’s going to need memory care at some point and that costs a fortune, and she’s pulling money out of the house so it’s there. She told me in August.”
“Then why does it say closing?”
“That’s what they call it, Ang. When you sign the papers. Any of the papers.”
I record deeds for a living. I know what they call it. I also know that a refinance doesn’t put anything in anybody’s name.
I didn’t say that. I said, “Then why can’t the boys see?”
He pulled into our lot and turned the truck off and sat there with his hands on the wheel.
“Because it’s embarrassing,” he said. “Because Dad’s sick and she’s doing all of it by herself, and she doesn’t want us feeling bad. Can you leave it alone for one week?”
I couldn’t.
That night, after he was asleep, I sent Beverly a text. I thought about it for an hour and it came out short anyway.
Is the house being sold Friday? I think Moses should know what he’s signing.
She didn’t answer me.
She answered the family group chat. Fourteen people, the aunts and the cousins and the neighbor with the potato salad, because Beverly added everybody to everything.
Some of you saw Angelica grab my phone today at my own anniversary. She went through my private messages. She has been waiting nine years for a piece of this house and now she has a baby to do it with. I’m sorry everybody had to see that.
Under it, gray and small: Beverly Petersen removed Angelica Nunley from the group.
Tram texted me on the side four minutes later. Just one line.
Did you see something?
I typed yes and deleted it. I typed no and deleted that too.
In the morning Jarrod’s phone was going before the coffee was. He took it out on the balcony. When he came back in he didn’t look at me.
“She wants the chairs back to the rental place by noon,” he said. “She asked for me. Just me.”
He took the truck keys off the hook and shut the door behind him without slamming it.
Counter four
Monday I was back at work. Daviess County Clerk, land records, counter four, the one by the water fountain.
I don’t use my own login for anything personal. Nobody at that office does if they want to keep the job. So I waited for lunch and went out front to the public terminal, the same one anybody off the street can use, and typed in Petersen, Moses.
Two hits.
The first was his father’s deed from 1958. I’d seen that one.
The second was a power of attorney. Recorded June 11. Moses A. Petersen, principal. Beverly J. Petersen, attorney-in-fact. Durable, general, real property included.
I paid my own dollar a page and printed it.
Shannon works the window next to mine. She’s been there twenty-two years and she notarizes everything that comes through the door, marriage affidavits, car titles, a man’s will written on the back of a feed receipt once. I put the pages on her counter.
“Does this look right to you?”
She read it with her chin down, the way she reads everything.
“It’s a form,” she said. “Kentucky statutory. It’s fine.” She flipped to the last page. “Oh. That’s Delano’s stamp.”
“You know him?”
“Everybody knows him. Wilkins, the title company over on Frederica. He closes half the houses in this county.” She tapped the seal. “He’s a notary, too. Does his own, so he doesn’t have to wait on anybody.”
I looked at the notary block.
The signature on the line said Moses A. Petersen, in blue, the M big and the rest falling downhill.
Under it was Delano Wilkins’s printed name, his commission number, his seal.
And the sentence they always put there, that the person named above personally appeared before me this day.
I read the day.
The ninth day of June.
The wallet
Wednesday, Tram texted me at 12:40.
Bev’s at the salon till 3. Color and cut. He’s by himself. I didn’t tell you this.
I put Anika in the car seat and drove over.
Moses was on the porch, on the top step his father poured, with a glass of tea going warm beside him. He looked at the car a while before he waved, like he was making sure.
“Angie,” he said. “Bring her up here.”
I sat one step down with Anika on my knees. I had the printed pages in the diaper bag. I’d practiced on the way over what to say and none of it was any good, so I just handed them to him.
He got his glasses out.
He read the first page. He read the second. He turned to the last one and held it out at arm’s length, then close.
“That’s not how I sign,” he said.
“No?”
“I don’t use the A. Never have. My dad was Moses A.” He tapped the page. “Who’s Delano Wilkins?”
“He has a title company. He says you went to his office on June ninth and signed this in front of him.”
Moses took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was the same brown wallet, worn white on the fold. He thumbed behind his driver’s license and came out with a strip of glossy paper folded in half, soft as cloth now.
He opened it on his knee.
Anika at thirty weeks, a gray curl of her. And in the corner, in white type: 06/09 10:22 AM.
He looked at it a long time.
Then he reached into his shirt pocket for the spiral notebook. Not the same one. The third of the three-pack, the cover bent around his chest. He went to the front of it, then put it back and said, “Hang on,” and went inside, and came back out with the first one, the one from spring.
He found June the way you’d find a page in a hymnal.
He turned it around so I could read it. His handwriting, all capitals, pencil.
JUNE 9. DROVE ANGIE. GIRL.
And under it, in the same pencil, pressed harder:
BEV SAYS I WENT TO BANK TODAY. I DID NOT.
I looked up at him.
He flipped forward. Page after page. BEV SAYS I CALLED HER SISTER. DID NOT. BEV SAYS I GAVE AWAY THE BOAT. ASK LEV. Some of them had a check mark next to them, like he’d gone back and confirmed.
The last page with writing on it said FRI 9 — DOCTOR. BEV DRIVES.
“I know I’m going,” Moses said. “I know I left the truck. I called Lev by Jarrod’s name the other day. He told me.” He shut the notebook. “But I’m not going as fast as she tells everybody.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
Anika grabbed the corner of the ultrasound and he let her have it.
“What does a man do,” he said, “when he wants his name back on his own house?”
“He revokes it,” I said. “You sign a revocation, a notary stamps it, and it gets recorded. Then anything she signs with that paper after it doesn’t count.”
“Where do they record it?”
“My counter.”
He put the notebook back in his pocket and stood up, one hand on the porch post.
“Get your keys,” he said. “What do I sign?”
Book 912, page 40
Shannon notarized it at 3:31. She asked Moses three questions first, his name, his birthday, the year he got married, and he got all three and then told her the year the Ohio flooded in ’64 for free. She stamped it. I typed it in myself, at counter four, with my own login, and my supervisor stood behind me and watched the whole thing so nobody could ever say I hadn’t done it straight.
A revocation of power of attorney. Recorded 3:52 p.m. Book 912, page 40.
He signed a new one while he was there. It named Lev. He made me call Lev first and ask.
Lev drove over from work in his uniform shirt and stood at the counter and read it twice. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Yeah.” Then he called Tram.
We were all in the Petersen kitchen when Beverly came home at ten after five with her hair done.
She saw my car first. Then Lev’s truck. She came in the side door already talking.
“No. Absolutely not. Moses, what is she doing in my house? Lev, what is this? I leave for two hours. Two hours, and she’s in here going through drawers.”
“Nobody went through anything, Mom,” Lev said.
I put the copy on the table. The recording stamp was on the top right corner, the way it always is.
Beverly didn’t pick it up. She read it from where she stood.
“This doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t know what he signed. Look at him. He doesn’t know what day it is. She drove a sick old man to her office and put a pen in his hand, and you all let her.” She pointed at me with her car keys. “That’s elder abuse. That’s what that is. I can call somebody about that.”
“Call him,” Moses said.
She looked at him.
“Delano,” he said. “Call him. Put him on the speaker.”
“I’m not calling anybody.”
Moses held his hand out. The same hand, the same way, palm up.
She didn’t give it to him. She called Jarrod instead.
He got there in eleven minutes, still in his work boots, and Beverly started over from the beginning for him. The phone. The group chat. Nine years. The baby. The drawers.
“She has been after this house since the day you brought her home. I said so. I said it to your father.”
Jarrod looked at the paper on the table. Then at his dad.
“Dad. Did you sign this?”
“I did,” Moses said. “And I didn’t sign the other one. I was at the baby doctor with Angie.” He laid the ultrasound strip on the table next to the recording stamp. Then the notebook, open to June.
Tram had been standing at the sink the whole time. She hadn’t said anything. Now she dried her hands on the towel and folded it.
“Bev,” she said. “You asked me to take him to the bank that day. June ninth. Remember? I told you I had work.”
Beverly turned around and stared at her.
“I’m not saying anything else,” Tram said. “I’m just saying you asked me.”
For a second the only sound in that kitchen was the ice maker.
Then Beverly put her keys down on the counter, very carefully, and spoke to Jarrod like the rest of us had left.
“Tell her,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell her where the thirty thousand was coming from.”
Jarrod looked at the floor. Same as under the maple.
“Mom.”
“Thirty thousand at closing, for the house by the bypass with the fence. For your daughter. You said yes in August. You said she’d come around once she had the yard.” She turned to me. “He knew it was a sale, honey. He knew Friday. He just didn’t think you needed to be bothered.”
I looked at Jarrod.
He said, “It was going to happen anyway, Ang. It’s her house too.”
Lev said, “Jesus, man.”
Beverly’s phone buzzed in her back pocket. She didn’t touch it. It buzzed again.
Moses got up, walked around the table, and took it out of her pocket himself. She let him. I don’t think she’d ever had him do that before.
He handed it to me.
“Angie,” he said. “Read me what it says.”
It was Delano. Where are you? Clerk shows something recorded on M this afternoon. Call me NOW.
I read it out loud, every word, the NOW too.
Moses nodded.
“Call him back,” he said. “Tell him book 912, page 40. Tell him I said Friday’s off.”
I did. Delano picked up on the first ring and said “Bev” and I told him. He didn’t say anything at all. Then he hung up.
Nobody in the kitchen looked at Beverly after that except Moses.
I picked Anika up out of the bouncer by the fridge. Jarrod didn’t move from his chair.
I carried her out the side door and down the porch steps by myself.
Thanksgiving
Beverly lives with her sister in Evansville now. Lev handles the money. Shannon says there’s a complaint about a notary in front of the Secretary of State, and she won’t tell me whose, which is how I know.
Jarrod has Anika on Sundays. He brings her back with her socks on the wrong feet. He’s living in a one-bedroom over the dry cleaner’s, and every time he hands her across he says, “Okay,” like there’s more and there isn’t.
I’m in an apartment by the hospital. I pay for all of it.
Moses called me himself the week before Thanksgiving. He’d written my number on the inside cover of the notebook.
“Bring her,” he said. “Bring a pie. Nothing with nuts.”
So that Thursday there were seven of us, at a card table and the kitchen table pushed together, and no rented chairs anywhere.
After, Moses wanted a picture on the porch.
Lev got everybody lined up on the steps. Tram, the aunt, two cousins. I had Anika, and I stood at the bottom with my hand out for the phone, because that’s where I stand.
Moses got his phone out of his shirt pocket and gave it to Lev instead.
Then he sat down on the top step and patted the concrete next to him.
“Up here, Angie,” he said. “Bring her up here.”
I climbed up and sat where his boot had been that Christmas, with Anika in my lap.
“Three, two, one,” Lev said.
“Again,” Moses said. “I want one where she’s looking.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s always the one holding the phone.
For more family betrayals and moments when the people closest to you take sides, read the story of a husband who knew what his stepsister was about to say and the brothers who laughed at a photo with their sister’s face cut out. There’s also the anniversary surprise that revealed an old friend in the wrong seat.
