My foster kids’ aunt ripped open their grandmother’s will in the dayroom at Heritage House in Muncie, with the old woman parked three feet away in her wheelchair, and read it loud enough for the bingo table. “You get thirty-one dollars a day a head to haul them here, so quit playing family.” She had no idea who was listening.
Four of my six fosters are Bonnie’s grandkids, and that house on Ashby Street was the only address they’d ever had that didn’t come with a caseworker.
I’d been bringing them every Sunday for fourteen months.
Since the stroke, Bonnie hadn’t said a word anybody could make out.
The staff said she might follow some of it. The doctor said probably not.
Landon still talked to her like she was answering.
He’s twelve. That Sunday he was showing her a math test with a 94 circled in red when Diamond came through the double doors in sunglasses.
She hadn’t visited since July.
“Oh good, you’re all here,” she said.
She had a manila envelope under her arm, the big kind, with a law office’s return sticker on the corner.
“Diamond, maybe not in front of the kids,” I said.
“They should hear it. It’s about them, isn’t it?”
She got the flap open with her thumb.
Edwin, who plays two cards at once and cheats on both, put his dabber down.
The caller stopped at G-52 and didn’t call the next one.
Diamond slid out four stapled pages and shook them open like a menu.
“The will of Bonnie Radcliffe,” she said. “Signed March 2019.”
Chloe slid her hand into mine. She’s nine. Her palm was sticky from the vending machine.
“The house at 418 Ashby goes to my daughter Diamond. The contents go to my daughter Diamond. The Buick goes to my daughter Diamond.”
She looked at me over the sunglasses.
“Want me to keep going? There’s no Mei in here. There’s no kids in here.”
Mei is their mother. She’s two years into five.
“Diamond, she’s sitting right here.”
“She doesn’t know where she is, Nga. That’s the whole point. That’s why I’ve got power of attorney and you’ve got a minivan.”
Landon turned the math test face down on Bonnie’s lap tray.
The twins kept coloring.
They’re five. They color through anything.
“I’m listing it in two weeks,” Diamond said. “Whatever junk they think is theirs over there is going to the curb.”
“Chloe’s bike is in that garage.”
“Then Chloe can come get it on the fourteenth. Between nine and ten.”
A woman at the next table said, “Honey, that’s not how you do that.”
“Mind your card, ma’am.”
Somebody’s walker had a tennis ball on only one foot, and it kept squeaking every time she shifted.
Karolina, the Sunday aide, had come to stand by the nurses’ cart.
She didn’t say anything. She was looking at Bonnie.
So I looked too.
Bonnie’s left hand, the one that still works a little, had come off the armrest.
It was on the corner of Landon’s test.
Pressing it flat.
Diamond didn’t see. She was busy reading the part about the executor.
“And I’m the executor, so if you’ve got a problem, you’ve got it with ME.”
“I don’t have a problem. I have four kids who want to know if they can still go in their grandma’s house.”
“They CAN’T. Is that clear enough? They are NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY, and they sure aren’t hers anymore.”
She pointed at her mother without turning her head.
“Do the math, Nga. Thirty-one a day times four. You’re the one making money off my mother.”
Landon stood up so fast his chair hit the wall.
“Sit down, Landon,” I said.
He didn’t.
He’s already taller than Diamond, and I could see him deciding what to do with it.
“Grandma said I could have the shed,” he said.
“Grandma doesn’t TALK, bud.”
That one landed on the whole room.
Edwin said, “Lady, you need to go.”
Diamond laughed and pushed the pages back into the envelope.
“I’m going. I just wanted it done in front of people, so nobody runs to a judge later saying they didn’t know.”
She bent and kissed the top of Bonnie’s head like it was a package she’d signed for.
That’s when Bonnie said, “Karolina.”
It came out cracked and slow. But it was a name.
The whole bingo table heard it.
Diamond straightened up. “What did she say?”
Karolina was already moving.
She went to the cart, opened the bottom drawer where they keep residents’ valuables in zip bags, and came back holding an envelope.
Plain white. Sealed. Taped twice across the flap.
Bonnie’s handwriting on the front, from before, when it was still neat.
My name.
Not just Nga. Nga Truong, spelled right, which my own caseworker can’t manage.
“She gave it to me in August,” Karolina said. “She told me the day her daughter read the other one in here, this one gets read in here too.”
Diamond took the sunglasses off.
“In August she couldn’t hold a spoon.”
“She could hold a pen,” Karolina said.
Bonnie’s eyes were on me. All the way open, for the first time since I’d known her.
“Out loud,” she said. “Like she did.”
“Don’t you DARE open that,” Diamond said.
My thumb was already under the tape.
G-52
The tape came off with a strip of the envelope still stuck to it.
Inside was one sheet of yellow legal paper folded in thirds. A small brass key was taped to the bottom of it, the tape gone brown at the edges.
“Give me that,” Diamond said.
I stood up so the bingo table was between us, and I read it the way Bonnie asked. Out loud.
“Nga Truong. If you are holding this, my daughter read my will to make a point. Let her. I meant it in 2019. The house isn’t in it because the house isn’t mine to give anymore. I took care of that the summer Mei went in. Landon gets the shed, like I told him. This is the key. Open it with him, and don’t let anybody in there first. Diamond, I hear everything. Bonnie Radcliffe.”
Edwin said, “Bingo.”
Nobody laughed. He wasn’t trying to be funny.
“That’s notebook paper,” Diamond said. “That’s nothing. She wrote that when she still thought Mei was getting probation. You can’t hand a lawyer a grocery list and a key.”
“Then you don’t need to worry about it,” Karolina said.
“I’m her power of attorney. Anything in that drawer is mine to look after.”
“It was in her purse when she came in,” Karolina said. “It’s got Mrs. Truong’s name on it.”
Diamond put the sunglasses back on, which is what she does instead of leaving.
I held the paper out to Bonnie so she could see it was the right one.
Her hand came off Landon’s test and touched the edge of it. Then it went back.
“She gets about ten words a day,” Karolina said to me, low, with her back to Diamond. “She’s been saving them for Sundays.”
I’d been coming every Sunday for fourteen months. I had never once heard one.
Landon was looking at the key in my hand.
“Grandma,” he said. “What’s in the shed?”
Three weeks in my spare room
The first time I met Bonnie Radcliffe, she was standing on my porch in a church blouse with her purse held in front of her like a shield.
That was two summers ago.
The week Mei got sentenced, the agency called me at ten at night with four kids and no bed for them. I said yes the way you say yes to that call. The twins were three. Chloe was seven and wouldn’t take her shoes off. Landon was ten and came up my front walk carrying everything they owned in one black garbage bag.
They stayed three weeks. Then the county finished the kinship paperwork and their grandma came to get them in the Buick.
She didn’t take them right away.
She sat at my kitchen table, drank the coffee I made her, and told me it was weak. Then she got a little spiral notebook out of her purse and a pencil.
“Spell your name,” she said.
I spelled it. N-G-A. T-R-U-O-N-G.
She wrote it down in that neat hand and made me check it. I’d had people at the DMV get it wrong with my license in front of them.
“If I go down,” she said, “they come back here. You hear me? Not to anybody else. Here.”
I said okay. I figured it was something grandmothers say.
Thirteen months later she had the stroke in the kitchen on Ashby Street, and Landon called 911 and then called me, in that order. The agency called me an hour after that. Bonnie had told them the same thing she told me, and she’d put it in writing.
Diamond was at every hearing after that.
She came in a blazer with a blue plastic folder of copies, and she called the judge “Your Honor” more times than the lawyers did. The caseworker called her “the responsible one” in front of me once and didn’t apologize. At Christmas she brought Bonnie a poinsettia, took a picture of it on the lap tray, and left before the twins finished unwrapping their mittens.
She got the power of attorney in the first month. Nobody fought her on it. There wasn’t anybody to fight with.
I got the kids, the stipend, and the Sundays.
Landon told me about the bus once, last spring, in the minivan on the way home. He’d been quiet the whole drive and then he wasn’t.
“Grandma and me took the bus downtown one time,” he said. “The summer Mom left. To a building with a flag. She let me do the stamp on her paper.”
I thought he meant something about his mom’s case. I didn’t ask, and I’ve thought about that a lot since.
“It went ka-chunk,” he said. “The lady let me do it twice because the first one was crooked.”
Now he was standing in the dayroom with his chair against the wall, and I put the key in his hand and closed his fingers over it.
Steven Yazzie’s voicemail
The voicemail was waiting for me Monday morning before I’d even got the twins’ cereal poured.
“Hi, this message is for Nyga Truong,” it said, which is how I knew it was Steven before he said his name.
Steven Yazzie has been the kids’ caseworker for eleven months. He’s not a bad man. He has ninety files and a Honda with a dent in the passenger door, and he wants every one of those files to stay quiet.
I called him back on my lunch break, sitting in the minivan in the Kroger lot.
“Diamond Radcliffe called our office Sunday night,” he said. “She’s alleging financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult.”
“By who?”
“By you, Nga. She says you’re using the visits to get her mother to sign things. She mentioned a document. A key.”
“Bonnie handed me that in front of forty people at bingo.”
“I’m not saying I believe it. I’m saying it’s on file now. And as POA, she’s told Heritage House her mother doesn’t receive visitors without her say. That’s within her rights.”
“The kids are the visitors.”
“I know.”
“Landon goes every Sunday. He shows her his homework.”
“I know, Nga. Until this gets looked at, I need you to stay off the property on Ashby too. Don’t give her anything else to call about.”
I called Heritage House after that and asked for Karolina. The girl at the front desk put me on hold for six minutes and came back and said Karolina wasn’t available and they couldn’t discuss residents with non-family.
Non-family. I’d signed that visitor book fifty-some Sundays.
That night at dinner I told the kids we were taking a break from Sundays for a little while. The twins asked if that meant no vending machine. Chloe stopped eating her rice.
Landon didn’t say anything until after the dishes.
He came and stood in the kitchen doorway with the key on a shoelace around his neck. He’d put it there himself. I hadn’t seen him do it.
“She said nine to ten on the fourteenth,” he said. “She said it in front of everybody.”
Thursday the fourteenth, nine to ten
I took Landon and Chloe out of school for it. I told Steven where we were going and when, by text, so it was in writing. He didn’t text back.
We got to Ashby Street at 9:04.
Bonnie’s whole life was on the lawn already. Kitchen chairs. A box of Christmas lights. The plaid recliner from the front room with the lever that only worked if you kicked it. Somebody had taken the drawers out of her dresser and stacked them in the driveway, and the clothes were still in them.
There was a sign stake leaning against the porch rail with no sign on it yet.
Diamond was on the steps on her phone. A woman in a gray blazer stood next to her holding a lockbox and a clipboard, and she was the only person there who looked embarrassed.
“You’ve got till ten,” Diamond said, without hanging up.
Chloe went straight for the garage. Her bike was against the back wall where she’d left it fifteen months ago, purple, with one streamer missing off the handlebar. She wheeled it out down the driveway past her grandma’s dresser drawers and didn’t look at them once.
I put the bike in the back of the minivan. When I came back up the drive, the woman with the clipboard was talking to Diamond, quiet, but it was a small yard.
“I can put the sign in the ground, Diamond. I can’t put it on the market. The title company won’t close on it until somebody deals with that recorded deed.”
“I told you it’s handled.”
“You told me that in September.”
Diamond turned around and saw me standing there.
“This is Ruby,” she said. “She’s my realtor. She doesn’t need to talk to you.”
Ruby looked at the clipboard.
I didn’t know what a recorded deed was. I knew what September was. September was a month before Diamond walked into the dayroom with a law office envelope and read a will out loud, so that nobody could say later they didn’t know.
Landon wasn’t next to me anymore.
He was halfway across the backyard, walking toward the shed with the shoelace pulled over his head.
The shed is green, or was. It has a padlock the size of a fist on a hasp Bonnie’s husband screwed on in the eighties.
“Hey,” Diamond said. “HEY. That’s part of the contents.”
Landon didn’t stop. He didn’t run either.
He put the brass key in the padlock with both hands, and it turned.
The coffee can
It smelled like gas and grass clippings inside.
There was a push mower, a bag of potting soil gone hard, and two plastic Christmas tubs. A rake with half its teeth. A calendar from a tire place in Yorktown still on May of a year I won’t bother with.
On the shelf over the workbench, at exactly the height of a ten-year-old’s eyes, was a red Folgers can with the lid taped on.
Landon took it down like he’d been told where it was. Maybe he had.
He pulled the tape off and handed me what was inside. A clear plastic sleeve, the kind you put a report in, and in it three pages, folded once.
The top page had a stamp in the corner. Delaware County Recorder. A date in June, two summers ago. A number.
TRANSFER ON DEATH DEED, it said across the top.
I’m not a lawyer. I read it standing in a shed in my work shoes with Diamond coming across the lawn behind me.
It had the address. 418 Ashby Street. It had Bonnie’s signature, neat, and a notary’s stamp under it. And it had a list, typed, of who gets the house when Bonnie dies.
Landon. Chloe. Both twins, by their full names, middle names and all.
In equal shares.
Under that was one more line, and I read it twice because the first time I thought I’d made it up.
To be held by Nga Truong as custodian under the Indiana Uniform Transfers to Minors Act until each beneficiary reaches the age of twenty-one.
Me. Spelled right. In June, two summers ago. After three weeks in my spare room and one cup of weak coffee.
Behind the deed was a receipt from the recorder’s office, stapled. Recording fee. Paid cash.
Landon was looking over my arm. He’s been reading over my arm since he was ten.
He turned the receipt over.
On the back, in pencil, in the neat hand, it said: Landon did the stamp. Crooked the first time.
Diamond’s blue folder
Diamond stopped in the shed door and filled it.
“Give me that,” she said. “That’s my mother’s property, and I’m her power of attorney, and you are trespassing on it with a child you’re PAID to drive around.”
I didn’t give it to her.
“Do you know what that is? That’s a piece of paper she signed when she was out of her mind over Mei. She cried for a month. She’d have signed a cereal box. You think a judge looks at that and says, sure, give the house to four kids in foster care and the foster lady with the minivan?”
Ruby had come up behind her on the grass. She didn’t say anything yet.
“I’ve known about it since September. Okay? Since September. Ruby found it, and I took care of it.”
She had the blue plastic folder under her arm. The same one from the hearings. She opened it right there in the shed door and pulled out a single page.
“Revocation,” she said. “Signed. Tuesday. At Heritage House, at her table, with a witness.”
She held it up so I could see it, the way she’d held the will up at bingo.
At the bottom was a line where Bonnie’s signature should be. What was there was a shape. It started like a B and went downhill and off the edge of the line, and it didn’t look like anything that came out of the hand that wrote on the back of that receipt.
“I helped her hold the pen,” Diamond said. “That’s allowed. I’m her POA. I can help her hold a pen.”
I got my phone out and took a picture of it while she was still holding it up.
“Don’t you take a picture of my—”
“Who was the witness?” Ruby said.
“An aide. It doesn’t matter which aide.”
“It does to the title company.”
“Whose side are you on? I’m paying you.”
“You’re not paying me anything until it sells, Diamond.”
Diamond turned back to me. She was breathing hard now, and her sunglasses were up in her hair.
“You want to know what I’ve done? I put her in Heritage. I sat with the Medicaid lady for four hours with every bank statement she ever had. I drove up from Indianapolis every time they called me about a bedsore. Mei gets to go to prison and you get to be the saint, and I get her bills. And she gives the house to THEM. To YOU. A stranger who knew her three weeks. So yes, I took a paper to her on Tuesday, and yes, I held the pen, because she doesn’t know what she’s signing, she doesn’t know what DAY it is—”
“You said she doesn’t know where she is,” I said.
That was all I said.
Diamond opened her mouth and nothing came out of it for a second.
Ruby was the one who did the math out loud.
“If she doesn’t know where she is, she can’t revoke anything,” Ruby said. “And if she does, she didn’t sign that.”
She unclipped the lockbox from her clipboard and set it on top of the recliner on the lawn.
“I’m not listing this house. Have a good day, Diamond.”
Diamond looked at Ruby’s back, and at me, and at Landon holding the Folgers can.
“Fine,” she said. “You keep your coffee can. I decide where my mother sleeps. You’ll never find her.”
Bingo in Indianapolis
She moved Bonnie that Friday, before anybody could stop her. A place on the north side of Indianapolis, an hour and ten minutes from my driveway if the construction on 69 isn’t bad.
I took the deed, the letter, the receipt and the picture of the revocation to Steven Yazzie’s office Monday morning, and I sat in the plastic chair outside it until he’d made two copies of everything. Karolina wrote out what she saw on Tuesday, which was Diamond at Bonnie’s table with the door shut and Bonnie crying after. She signed it with her full name. She lost her Sunday shift at Heritage House two weeks later. She says it isn’t because of that.
Adult Protective Services opened a case. A judge in Delaware County put Diamond’s power of attorney on hold until there’s a hearing. The house on Ashby Street sits there with its lawn cleared and its locks changed and nobody’s name on a sign. I paid a lawyer named Varma four hundred dollars to tell me to leave it exactly like that.
The stipend didn’t cover it. I don’t do the math on that anymore.
We go every Sunday. We leave at 12:15 so we make the bingo.
The dayroom up there has a bigger TV and worse coffee. There’s no Edwin. The aide on Sundays is a man named Vladimir who calls Bonnie “Miss Bonnie” and doesn’t know about the ten words.
She still uses them. Mostly on Landon.
This Sunday the caller’s voice gave out halfway through the second game, and she held the wire cage out to the room and asked if anybody wanted a turn.
Landon got up before I could tell him to sit down.
Chloe moved her chair against Bonnie’s wheelchair. The twins kept coloring.
Bonnie’s left hand came off the armrest and found the corner of her card.
Landon cranked the cage, pulled a ball, and looked at his grandmother before he read it.
“G-53,” he said.
If this one got to you, call the grandparent who doesn’t say much anymore, and stay on the line long enough to hear what they do say.
Family betrayals have a way of getting loud when money and inheritance are involved – see the hearing aids taken before a family toast and the father who cut his daughter off in front of the dean. For another courtroom turn, there’s the attorney who demanded a new judge.
