My uncle stood up at my grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday and told the whole room, “Shana cleans toilets at night so the rest of us don’t have to smell her,” then slid the deed to Grandma’s $340,000 house across the cake table and held out a pen. He had no idea what was folded in my uniform pocket.
That house is the only thing my grandmother has left with my grandfather’s name still on it.
She has lived there forty-seven years.
I came straight from my shift, so I was still in the navy work shirt with my name stitched over the pocket.
I clean office buildings from ten at night until six in the morning.
Nobody in my family has ever asked me which buildings.
The party was in the back room of the Legion hall in Kokomo, under a balloon arch a neighbor had put together, and one gold balloon kept working itself loose and drifting toward the exit sign.
Uncle Clyde had paid for the room. He told people that twice.
He’s my mother’s older brother, he sells insurance out of a suite in an office park off the highway, and he has talked to me my whole life like I was the help at his own family’s table.
When I walked in he looked at my shirt and laughed.
“Did you at least wash your hands first?” he said.
His wife Gladys laughed along with him.
My mother put a paper plate in my hands.
“Just eat something, honey,” she said.
Grandma waved me over and took my face in both her hands, and her left one was bare.
I looked at it.
She saw me looking.
“Clyde took my ring in to get it cleaned for today,” she said. “Sixty-four years it never left my finger, and now it’s sitting at some jeweler’s.”
“They’re backed up, Ma,” Clyde said from across the room. “Monday. I promise.”
I didn’t say anything.
I had cleaned suite 210 on Wednesday night.
At ten to three in the morning I emptied the wastebasket under my uncle’s desk, and I took something out of it that I had no business taking.
It had been in my pocket for three days.
Then the cake came out, and then Clyde was tapping a plastic fork on his cup.
“Ma, you carried this family for sixty years,” he said. “Now it’s our turn to carry you.”
Everybody clapped.
Then he opened his briefcase and took out a folder.
A quitclaim deed. Grandma’s address typed across the top. A little yellow tab stuck at the bottom that said SIGN HERE.
“It’s just paperwork,” he said to the room. “If she ever has to go into a home, the state can’t touch the house as long as it’s in my name. Lawyer says it’s the smart move.”
My mother Trisha set her fork down.
“You never said one word about this to me,” she said.
“Because you’d make it a whole thing, Trish.”
Grandma looked at that paper like it was written in another language.
“I’d want to read it first, Clyde,” she said.
“Ma. It’s your birthday. Either you trust me or you don’t.”
He put the pen in her hand and folded her fingers around it.
I stood up.
Clyde turned around and grinned at me.
“Oh, here we go, the janitor has a legal opinion,” he said. “Shana, honey, you mop floors in buildings where people do real work. Sit down and let the grownups handle this.”
Two of my cousins laughed.
His own son Alex looked at his shoes.
“Grandma, don’t sign that yet,” I said.
“She doesn’t need advice from somebody who empties TRASH CANS FOR A LIVING,” Clyde said, loud enough that the man running the bar out front looked in.
I walked over to the table.
Clyde’s grin stayed on his face about a second longer than it should have.
“You’re right, Uncle Clyde,” I said. “I do empty trash cans.”
“I emptied YOURS on Wednesday.”
I took the pink slip out of my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it flat on top of the deed, right over the yellow tab that said SIGN HERE.
Clyde’s hand came down on the table so hard the forks jumped.
“Where the hell did you get that,” he said.
Gladys stood up so fast her folding chair went over backward.
Grandma set the pen down.
She picked up the slip and held it close to her face, the way she reads the church bulletin.
“Fourteen karat yellow gold band,” she read out loud. “One small diamond.”
She looked down at her bare hand.
Then she looked up at her son.
“Clyde,” she said. “Why does this have my name on it and YOUR SIGNATURE?”
Nobody in that room was laughing anymore.
Clyde wasn’t looking at his mother.
He was looking at me.
The pink slip
“Because I’m the one who took it in, Ma,” he said. “It’s a loan. People do it every day. You put something up, you get it back. I’ll have it on your finger Monday.”
That was the answer. He’d pawned it.
He said it fast, the way he says the part of a policy nobody reads.
“You told me the jeweler,” Grandma said.
“I didn’t want you worrying on your birthday.”
“So you told me the jeweler.”
He reached across the cake for the slip. Grandma’s hand was on it, and mine was on top of hers, and I didn’t move it.
The slip was from a pawn shop on Sycamore Street. I knew the place. I’d driven past it a thousand times on my way to work. It had his handwriting in the box for the owner’s name, Ophelia Akers, in block capitals, and his signature underneath, and a number in the loan box.
Grandma found the number.
“Eleven hundred dollars,” she read.
Gladys set her chair back up and didn’t sit in it.
“It’s a business thing,” Clyde said. “Cash flow. You wouldn’t understand it, Ma, and it doesn’t matter, because Monday it’s back.”
He kept saying Monday like it was a day he owned.
I had carried that slip for three days, and the one thing about it I couldn’t get past was where I’d found it.
“If you were getting it back Monday,” I said, “why was the ticket in your trash?”
Mulberry Street
My grandfather bought the house on Mulberry Street in 1979 for forty-one thousand dollars. Grandma still has the closing paper. She keeps it in a Folgers can on top of the refrigerator with every property tax receipt since, rubber-banded by year.
She showed me that can when I was nine. She took it down and made me read my grandfather’s name off the deed out loud, and then she put it back up where I couldn’t reach.
“That’s so nobody ever tells you different,” she said.
He died in 2015. She never took his name off anything. Not the mailbox, not the checkbook, not the deed.
I lived in that house for two years when I was in high school, after my mother and my dad split and Mom was working doubles at the hospital laundry. I slept in the sewing room off the kitchen. Grandma woke me at six every morning by banging a wooden spoon on the doorframe twice.
Clyde never lived there after he was eighteen. He came on Sundays. He’d stand in the kitchen in his tie and tell Grandma what she was paying too much for. Her insurance, mostly. He sold her three policies over the years.
Since August he’d been sleeping in her back bedroom. Him and Gladys both, and Alex on the couch.
“Their floors are getting redone,” Grandma told me on the phone. “It’s nice having people in the house.”
Ten weeks, now, for floors.
I knew Clyde’s suite before I knew it was his. I’ve been on that office park for almost three years. Four buildings, twelve suites to a building, and 210 has a glass door with gold letters on it that I wipe every Wednesday.
The first time I saw AKERS on that door I stood in the hall with my cart for a full minute. Then I went in and did my job.
He never knew it was me. The crew comes after nine. He only ever saw us once, the night he stayed late and left a sticky note for my supervisor, Krystal Garrison, about streaks on his glass. He wrote her number on it himself, off the lobby board, and stuck it to the door.
I threw that note away too.
What I knew about my uncle I learned from his wastebasket, which is something I’m not proud of and also didn’t go looking for.
Since summer it had been envelopes. Torn in half, never opened all the way. FINAL NOTICE in red through the window of one. A letter from his landlord with the second page missing.
The pink slip was folded once. I almost tied it up with the rest. Then the word band came through the paper.
I’d been holding it since Wednesday because I didn’t know who’d believe the janitor over the man who paid for the room.
Clyde was looking at me across the cake now like he finally knew which janitor.
“It’s a duplicate,” he said. “They give you two.”
“Then where’s yours?” Grandma said.
Krystal Garrison, on speaker
He didn’t have one.
He patted his jacket like he might, and then he stopped patting.
“She went through your garbage,” Gladys said. She said it to the room, to the cousins, to the bartender in the doorway. “She goes into people’s offices at night and takes things out of their garbage. That’s what she does. That’s a crime.”
“Mom,” Alex said.
“Don’t you start.”
My mother came around the table and put her hand on my arm.
“Shana, honey,” she said. “Give him the paper. Let him explain it to her at home.”
That’s my mother. She wanted the cake cut and everybody back in their chairs. She has wanted that at every party I’ve ever been to.
“He’s had three weeks to explain it at home,” I said.
The date on the slip was September 29. The Sunday after church, Grandma said later. He’d asked for the ring in her own kitchen so it’d be shiny for the party.
I tried one thing. I reached over and slid the deed out from under Grandma’s hand, just to get it off the table, just to give her a minute without that yellow tab in front of her.
Clyde caught my wrist.
He didn’t squeeze. He just held it there over the cake until I let go of the paper, and he pulled the deed back in front of his mother and squared it up with the edge of the table.
“You want to play it like that,” he said. “Fine.”
He took his phone out. He scrolled. He knew exactly what he was looking for, because he’d saved it off the sticky note.
He put it on speaker and set it on the table between the cake and the forks.
It rang four times.
“This is Krystal.”
“Ms. Garrison, Clyde Akers, suite 210, Building C. I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday. One of your people took documents out of my office. Personal financial documents. I’ve got her standing right here.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Who?”
“Shana. Sutton.”
“Shana,” Krystal said. “Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Did you take something out of a client’s office?”
Everybody in that back room heard me say yes. My cousins heard it. My mother heard it. The bartender heard it.
“Then you’re off that park as of right now,” Krystal said. “Don’t go back Monday. Come see me at the shop and we’ll talk about what’s left.”
Gladys folded her arms.
I’ve worked for that company three years. Nights, holidays, the week of the ice storm. I had never once been called into the shop.
“Thank you,” Clyde said. “That’s all I wanted.”
“Mr. Akers,” Krystal said. “While I have you. You know I can’t put anybody in 210 after this week anyway.”
Clyde reached for the phone.
“The property manager sent us the lockout list Thursday. Your suite’s on it. Rent. They’re changing the locks Friday, so if there’s anything of yours in there—”
He hung up.
Grandma was looking at the phone on the table.
“Clyde,” she said. “They’re locking you out of your office?”
The second folder
“It’s a dispute,” Clyde said. “It’s a landlord thing.”
“Is it a floors thing too?”
Grandma said it without looking up, the way she says grace.
Nobody answered her. Clyde’s briefcase was open on the folding chair beside him where he’d left it, the lid up, and there was another folder in it. Blue, not tan like the deed’s.
Grandma saw it the same second I did. She is eighty-five and has a hip that clicks, and she was faster than her son.
She leaned over and took it out.
“Ma.”
“I said I’d want to read it first.”
She held it close. Her lips move when she reads. They always have.
It was three pages stapled at the corner, with a letterhead from a lender out of Indianapolis, and her address was on it. Mulberry Street, typed exactly like on the deed.
“Commitment letter,” she read. “Borrower, Clyde R. Akers and Gladys M. Akers.”
Gladys took one step toward the table and stopped.
“Loan amount,” Grandma read. “Two hundred fifteen thousand dollars. Secured by the property at.”
She read her own address out loud.
My mother’s hand came off my arm.
“Closing scheduled,” Grandma read. She turned the page. “Tuesday, November fourth. Subject to recording of the deed in the borrower’s name.”
She put the blue folder down on the table, on top of the deed, next to the pink slip, and lined the edges up the way Clyde had.
So that was what the state couldn’t touch.
The pen was still lying where she’d set it. A cheap one, a ballpoint with his agency’s name on the side, the same pens he left in her kitchen drawer every Sunday for twenty years.
“Tuesday,” Grandma said. “You were going to tell me about it Tuesday?”
The back bedroom
“You want to do this here?” Clyde said. “Fine. We’ll do it here.”
He didn’t sit down. He walked a small circle behind his chair with his hands on his hips.
“I’ve got four clients that stopped paying me since spring, Ma. Four. You know what that does to a man in my business? You know what it costs to keep a suite on that park? I kept it going. I kept it going a whole year on cards. Nobody in this family asked me once how I was doing. Not once. Trisha didn’t ask. You didn’t ask.”
“You came every Sunday,” Grandma said.
“And told you everything was fine, because that’s my job. That’s what the son does.”
Gladys started crying, and it made her angry, and she talked through it.
“We have been in your back bedroom since August, Ophelia. Ten weeks. On a mattress that’s older than Alex. And you never asked why. You just made extra pancakes.”
“I thought it was floors,” Grandma said.
“There’s no floors,” Alex said.
He was still looking at his shoes when he said it, and then he wasn’t.
“The bank sold our house on the courthouse steps in August, Grandma. I was there. Dad made me promise not to tell you, because you’d worry.”
“Alex, go out to the car,” Clyde said.
“No.”
That was all Alex said. He didn’t go anywhere. He came around and stood next to my mother.
Clyde looked at his son for a long second, then turned back to his mother, and his voice went low and friendly, the insurance voice, and that was worse.
“Ma. Listen to me. It’s two hundred thousand against a house that’s worth three-forty. You’d never even feel it. I pay it off in three years, maybe two, everything’s back the way it was, and the ring’s on your finger Monday. That’s the whole plan. That’s all this is.”
“You threw the ticket away,” I said.
He didn’t look at me.
“Dad always said the house was going to be mine. He said it to me in the garage when I was sixteen. You were there for that, Ma. It’s mine anyway. I’m just asking for it a little early.”
“He never said that,” Grandma said.
“He said it.”
“I’ve got his name on the deed in a coffee can, Clyde. I made Shana read it to me when she was nine. I’ll make you read it.”
He picked the pen up off the table. He held it out to her one more time.
“Sign it, Ma,” he said. “Or we can talk about who’s driving you to the doctor, and who’s living in that house, and who’s going home with you tonight.”
Gladys had stopped crying.
My mother picked up her purse.
I took the deed and the blue folder and the pink slip off the table. I folded the three of them together, once, and put them in my shirt pocket, under my name.
Clyde said, “Those are mine.”
“The ticket has her name on it,” I said. “So does the house.”
I took my phone out and took a picture of the commitment letter before I put it away, both pages, the address and the closing date, and he saw me do it.
“Grandma,” I said. “I’ll drive you home.”
My mother said, “Clyde, your things are going in the garage tonight. Come get them tomorrow while she’s at church.”
Grandma stood up. She took her purse off the back of her chair and her cardigan off the back of mine. She left the cake. She left the pen lying on the table where he’d dropped it.
On the way out she stopped by the balloon arch and pulled the gold balloon down by its ribbon, the one that kept getting loose, and wrapped the ribbon around her bare hand twice.
The Folgers can
On the second Saturday in November I drove Grandma to the pawn shop on Sycamore Street in my car, which slips going into third.
I’d been putting money back for the transmission since June. Thirteen hundred dollars in an envelope in my glove box. The ticket was eleven hundred, plus a month of interest, plus a fee for a late pickup the man behind the counter didn’t have to charge and charged anyway.
I paid it out of the envelope. Grandma stood at the glass case with her purse held in front of her in both hands and didn’t say anything until he brought it out in a little plastic bag.
She put it on herself in the parking lot.
Krystal kept me on. Not on the office park. I do two elementary schools on the south side now, which is fewer hours and more vomit, and I’m learning the floor buffer they’ve got, which is older than me.
Clyde and Gladys are in an apartment out by the mall. The closing never happened. A lender can’t close on a deed that never got signed. Alex stays with Grandma during the week and drives her to church, and on Sundays Clyde doesn’t come.
My mother calls her brother sometimes. She doesn’t tell me what they say, and I don’t ask.
Grandma had the locks on Mulberry Street changed the Monday after the party. She paid for it herself out of the checkbook with my grandfather’s name on it.
Last Saturday I came over straight from a shift again, still in the navy shirt. She had pancakes going.
The gold balloon from the Legion hall was still tied to the back of her kitchen chair, three weeks old and mostly down, floating about a foot off the linoleum. Every time the furnace kicked on it drifted toward the back door.
She’d taken the Folgers can down. The closing paper from 1979 was out on the table, and the deed, and my grandfather’s name.
She put a plate in front of me. Her ring hit the edge of it.
Then she sat down across from me and picked up her fork and pointed it at my pocket, at my name.
“Which buildings, honey?” she said.
If you’ve got somebody in your family who works the shift nobody asks about, ask them tonight.
Family gatherings can bring out some astonishing behavior, as these stories about a wedding-day truck dispute and brothers trying to sell the family shop show. And for another tangled inheritance story, read how one woman’s mother received $40 a month.
