My husband of three years grabbed my arm hard enough to leave marks and walked me to the back door. “You’ve got till morning to sign that $38,000 over to Don, or you’re out of my house,” he said. He drove off sure of it. He’d never read one word of what he signed the week we married.
That $38,000 was every dollar I’d saved in twenty-six years of running a school cafeteria, and it was going to pay for my funeral so nobody else had to.
It started at Sunday dinner.
His brother Don and Don’s wife Lucy came for pot roast, the way they had every Sunday since I married into that family.
Don waited until I’d cut the pie.
“There’s a laundromat out by the bypass,” he said. “Fourteen washers. Owner’s moving to Florida and wants out by Christmas.”
“That’s nice, Don,” I said.
“He’s thirty-eight short,” Garland said. “Val’s got it sitting in a CD at the credit union doing nothing.”
I had never told Garland what was in that CD.
He’d been in my mail.
Lucy smiled at me across the table with lipstick on her front tooth.
“It’s FAMILY, Valerie,” she said. “You’d get it back in a year.”
“No,” I said.
That was all I said.
Don laughed like I’d made a joke. Garland didn’t.
They left at eight and took the rest of the pie.
I was scraping the roaster when Garland came back in from walking them to the truck, and he went right past me to my purse on the counter.
He took out my checkbook.
“Write it tonight and we’re done talking about it,” he said.
“Put that back.”
“I’m not asking, Val.”
“That is MY money. That’s my burial.”
He dropped the checkbook in the dishwater.
I went in after it up to the elbow, and that’s when he got hold of me.
His thumb went in above my elbow and stayed there.
He walked me across the kitchen the way you’d walk a dog off the couch, all the way to the back door, and he opened it with his free hand.
The cold came in around my feet.
“You’ve got till morning to sign that $38,000 over to Don, or you’re out of my house,” he said.
“Your house,” I said.
“MY house. My name’s on the mailbox, Val. I put it there myself.”
He had. Stick-on letters from the hardware store, ARNDT, a little crooked on the D.
Then he took his keys off the hook and drove to Don’s.
I stood there with the door open.
The clock on the stove was still an hour off from the time change. Neither of us had touched it.
I went to the spare room and put a chair under the knob.
I didn’t sleep.
By midnight there were four purple marks on my arm in a row.
Around two I started thinking about the week we got married.
Garland had a truck note, two cards in collections and a laugh that made me forget both.
I’d bought this house in Kingsport in 1997, by myself, twenty-two years before I ever met him.
The Tuesday before the wedding, my lawyer, Mrs. Iyer, put a stack of papers in front of him in her office.
“This house stays separate,” she said. “Do you want your own attorney to read these first?”
“Ma’am, I’d sign ANYTHING for this woman,” Garland said.
He signed every page without turning one back, and then he took us both out for catfish.
At five I got the stepladder and brought the fireproof box down off the top shelf of my closet.
It was all there.
I made coffee.
I put on the red sweater my sister gave me, the one with sleeves long enough to cover my arm, and I sat down at the kitchen table with the blue folder in front of me.
At ten after eight Garland’s truck came up the drive.
Don got out of the passenger side. Lucy climbed down out of the back.
Behind them a white van pulled in with a ladder on the roof.
Lucy already had her phone up.
Garland didn’t knock. Why would he.
“Locksmith’s here,” he said. “Every SINGLE lock, Val, by noon. So GET YOUR SHIT AND GET OUT.”
The locksmith stood in the back doorway with a gray toolbox and looked at the floor.
“Don’t make this ugly, Valerie,” Lucy said.
“She’s not going to make it ugly,” Don said. “Are you, hon?”
I didn’t get up.
I put my hand flat on the folder.
Garland leaned on the table on his knuckles and grinned down at me with every tooth he had.
“What’s that,” he said. “Your will?”
“Sit down, Garland.”
“I’m not sitting down in my own kitchen because you said to.”
I opened the folder and turned the deed around so it faced him.
Then I slid it across the table until it stopped against his knuckles.
“Read the name on it,” I said. “Out LOUD, so Lucy gets it.”
The blue folder
He looked down at it. With Lucy’s phone right there over his shoulder he couldn’t not.
“Valerie J. Hightower,” he read. “Sole owner.”
He said it the way he read the specials off the board at Shoney’s. Then he looked back up at me.
“So?”
“So it’s mine.”
“It WAS yours. In 1997.” He pushed the deed back across the table with one finger until it sat square in front of me again. “Things change when a woman gets married. Ask anybody.”
Don laughed through his nose. Lucy stepped sideways to get my face.
I picked up my coffee. It had gone cold while I sat there waiting on them. I drank some anyway, because it gave my hand a job.
“Ask Mrs. Iyer,” I said.
“I’m not asking that woman a thing.” He turned to the back door. “Go on and get started, buddy. Front door first.”
The locksmith didn’t move. He was still looking at the floor, only harder now.
Garland turned back around to me and tapped the pocket of his flannel shirt, twice.
There was a folded paper in it I had never seen before.
Easter Sunday
Last Easter, Lucy notarized the sale of Garland’s bass boat at this same table.
The man buying it went to Don’s church. He brought cash in a bank envelope, and Lucy brought her stamp in the zippered pouch she kept in her purse. She notarized for half of First Baptist on Sunday afternoons, and she told you so.
She inked it on one of my saucers and pressed it down on the bill of sale. LUCY M. ARNDT, NOTARY PUBLIC, SULLIVAN COUNTY, and a little seal in the middle.
Garland picked the stamp up afterward and turned it over in his fingers.
“That’s all it takes?” he said.
“That and my signature,” Lucy said. “And I don’t sign for just anybody.”
The boat man counted out the money. Garland put it in his wallet. I got up to start the ham.
That boat was the last thing Garland owned outright. The truck still had a note on it. The light bill in this house was in his name because the week we got back from Gatlinburg he’d called the power company and switched it over.
“Man of the house pays the lights,” he said.
It was ninety dollars a month and it made him happy, so I let him. The stick-on letters went up on the mailbox that same Saturday.
I never changed my name. I’d been Hightower through one marriage that ended and twenty-six years of payroll forms at the school, and I wasn’t going to learn to sign something new at sixty-one.
Garland teased me about it every time I wrote a check.
“Valerie J. Hightower,” he’d say, reading over my shoulder. “Like you’re keeping your bags packed.”
“Like I’m keeping my name,” I’d say.
He signed our Christmas cards Garland and Valerie Arndt in that big loopy hand of his, and I let that go too.
He had a good laugh. That was most of what I married.
In April he’d brought some papers to this table after supper. “Property tax thing for seniors, Val. Sign where I put the sticky notes.” The news was on. I signed three sticky notes’ worth and went back to the dishes.
The locksmith set his toolbox down on my linoleum.
“I’m going to need to see something with this address on it,” he said. “From both of y’all.”
The light bill
I got my license out of my purse.
Garland got out his wallet. He laid down his license with my street on it, and then he unfolded a light bill and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. Appalachian Power. GARLAND ARNDT. My address.
“Three years I’ve paid the lights in this house,” he said.
I put my deed down beside my license.
The locksmith looked at one pile and then the other. He had a pencil behind his ear and he didn’t take it down.
“Ma’am. Sir,” he said. “Y’all are both on the address. I’m not a judge.”
“She’s not well,” Lucy said.
She said it to the phone, not to him.
“Look at the stove.” She swung the camera over to it. “It’s still on last week’s time. She doesn’t even know what hour it is, Garland. I told you she’s been like this.”
“Neither one of us changed it,” I said. “He lives here too.”
“See, now she says he lives here,” Don said.
He pulled out Garland’s chair and sat down in it and folded his hands on my tablecloth like he was waiting on somebody to say grace.
I picked up my phone and called Mrs. Iyer’s office.
It rang four times. Then the girl’s voice on the recording said they opened at nine and to leave a message.
My phone said 8:21. The stove said 7:21.
“Mrs. Iyer, it’s Valerie Hightower,” I said. “Please call me as soon as you get in. There’s a locksmith in my kitchen.”
Lucy laughed.
“She called her lawyer on the locksmith,” she said to the phone.
I hung up and turned to the man in the doorway.
“I’ll pay you to leave,” I said. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll pay it, and you go on to your next job.”
“Ma’am, I already got paid,” the locksmith said.
“Cash,” Garland said. “Last night. Front door, buddy.”
The locksmith picked up his toolbox and went down my hall without looking at either of us.
Down the hall, the drill started on my front door.
April eleventh
Don leaned toward me across the table.
“Hon,” he said. “Nobody wants all this.”
“All what.”
“Lawyers. Driving to Blountville to record stuff. Locks.” He opened his hands. “You write the check for the laundromat this morning, Garland tears that thing up, and we’re all right back here Sunday eating pot roast. Nobody ever has to talk about it.”
“What thing,” I said.
Garland unbuttoned his shirt pocket.
“I didn’t want to do it like this,” he said.
He unfolded the paper on the table next to my deed. It had been folded in four and carried a while. He kept his palm flat on the bottom half of it.
QUITCLAIM DEED, it said across the top.
Under that, my address. Under that, typed out, Valerie J. Hightower, Grantor, conveying an undivided one-half interest to Garland Arndt, Grantee.
Dated the eleventh of April.
“You signed it in April,” Garland said. “Right here. With the news on.”
The sticky notes. I could see them, yellow, three of them, curling at the corners. I could see the weatherman pointing at Bristol. I could not see one word on any page.
“She’s thinking about it,” Lucy said to the phone. “Look at her face.”
“Lucy stamped it,” Garland said. “It’s good as gold. I take this to Blountville at one o’clock, and half this house is mine. Then in the divorce I get half of the other half, and half of that CD besides.”
The drill stopped down the hall. Started again.
“Or,” Don said, “you write a check.”
I looked at Don. He had the decency to look at the sugar bowl.
This was what last night had been. It wasn’t Garland losing his temper over a laundromat. They’d had this paper in his pocket since April, waiting for the day I said no.
“Three years,” I said.
“Three years I paid the lights,” Garland said. “Three years I stuck it out with you writing Hightower on every check like I was some boarder. I’m owed, Val.”
His hand stayed flat over the bottom of the page, where the signatures go.
The dish towel
“I’ll write it,” I said.
Don sat back. Lucy came in closer with the phone.
“But I’m not writing thirty-eight thousand dollars off a paper I’m not allowed to read,” I said.
Garland smiled. He lifted his hand off the bottom of the page and kept just his fingertips on the corner, so I could look and not touch.
The signature was in blue ink, with big loops on the capitals.
Valerie J. Arndt.
Under it was the notary block. The stamp was crooked, like somebody had pressed it down without a saucer to ink it on. LUCY M. ARNDT, NOTARY PUBLIC, SULLIVAN COUNTY. Next to the stamp was Lucy’s signature, in the same blue ink, with the same big loops on the capitals.
I got up.
“Where are you going,” Garland said.
I went to the sink. My checkbook was where I’d left it at five that morning, open on a dish towel, the pages gone wavy and stiff. I carried it back to the table and opened it to the top check.
VALERIE J. HIGHTOWER, printed in the corner, and my address.
I took the pen out of the folder and signed my name across that ruined check, the way I have signed every check in this kitchen since 1997. I laid it down next to his paper.
Garland looked at the two of them.
“So you signed it different that day,” he said.
“I have never in my life written the name Arndt.”
“You sign the Christmas cards—”
“You sign the Christmas cards,” I said.
Don leaned over to look. He didn’t say anything. He looked at it a long time, and then he looked at his brother’s hands.
“Lucy,” I said. “Come read your stamp.”
She came around the table with the phone still up. Then she lowered it.
She bent over the paper with her nails held just off the page, not touching it, and read the notary block twice. She looked at the signature next to her stamp. She looked at the one above it.
“That’s not my signature,” Lucy said.
Lucy’s phone
“Lucy, you stamped a whole stack of stuff at Easter,” Garland said. “You don’t remember. You’d had three glasses of wine, you were stamping everything that—”
“I stamped one thing at Easter, Garland. Your boat.”
“You stamped this. You did. You just don’t—”
“I write my name fifty times a week,” Lucy said. “I know my own name.”
She put the phone back up. It was on Garland now.
“Luce,” Don said. “Put that down.”
“That’s my commission, Don. That’s my bond. They pull my commission over this, and I’m the one who goes and explains it to the Secretary of State.” She didn’t lower the phone an inch. “He had my stamp in his hand at Easter. I watched him.”
Garland turned to me. His voice went soft, the voice from the catfish place.
“Val. Val, listen to me. It was never going to Blountville. I did it so you’d quit being stubborn. That’s all it was ever for.” He picked the paper up off the table. “Write the check and I’ll burn this in the sink right now. You can watch me do it. Thirty-eight thousand and we forget this whole weekend happened. It’s a piece of paper. It doesn’t mean a thing unless somebody records it.”
I pushed up the left sleeve of the red sweater.
Four marks above the elbow, in a row, purple going green at the edges.
Lucy’s phone came off Garland and onto my arm and stayed there.
Nobody said anything. The drill had stopped. The locksmith was standing in the hall door with his toolbox, looking at my arm, not the floor.
I took the paper out of Garland’s hand. He let me, because he didn’t know yet what I wanted it for. I put it in the blue folder on top of my deed and closed the folder.
Then he knew. He reached for it.
Don stood up and took hold of his arm.
“Leave it,” Don said.
“You’re taking HER side? Over a laundromat?”
“That’s Lucy’s name on it, you dumb son of a bitch,” Don said. “Leave it.”
Garland pulled loose, but he left it.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Then I’m filing. I get half of everything anyway. Half the house, half the CD. That’s Tennessee law, I don’t need a piece of paper for that.”
“Page four, Garland,” I said. “Ask Mrs. Iyer for a copy.”
“What’s on page four?”
I didn’t answer him.
I turned to the locksmith.
“Whose name was on that deed?” I said.
“Yours, ma’am.”
“How much to finish? Every lock, new keys, all of them to me.”
He looked at Garland. Then he looked at my arm again.
“Same as he paid,” he said.
“Fine.”
“You can’t do this,” Garland said. “I’ve paid the lights in this house three years. I’ve got nowhere to go. You can’t put me out on the street over one bad night.”
“Your clothes are in the hall closet and the spare room,” I said. “You’ve got till noon.”
He laughed. It wasn’t the good laugh.
I picked up my phone and called the sheriff’s office.
“Val. Val, you call them and I go to jail. That what you want? Your husband sitting in Blountville?” He came around the table. Don got in front of him again. “Three years, Val. Three YEARS.”
A woman answered.
“I need to report a forged deed,” I said. “And I’d like somebody to come look at my arm.”
Garland sat down in my chair. It was the first time all morning he’d sat down.
Then he got up and took the box of trash bags out from under my sink.
Garland went out the back door with a trash bag of shirts, and the locksmith held it for him.
The D
The next Sunday I made a pot roast anyway.
A little one, in the small pan. The big roaster was too much for one person, so I left it in the cabinet over the refrigerator, where it could stay.
The deputy’s card was on the refrigerator under a magnet from the credit union. On the back he’d written a case number and the date of the hearing for the order of protection, the ninth of December. Mrs. Iyer had her copy of everything. The quitclaim was in an evidence bag somewhere in Blountville, with the boat man’s bill of sale beside it for the signatures.
Her retainer came out of the CD. The credit union took four hundred and twelve dollars for breaking it early, and the girl at the window said she was sorry like it was her fault. What was left I put back in for five more years.
Lucy sent me the video at eleven o’clock Monday night. All of it, forty-one minutes. No message. She hasn’t called since, and neither has Don.
I heard at Food City that the laundromat man found a buyer from Johnson City.
The marks on my arm had gone yellow. I wore a short-sleeved blouse to church that morning.
At five I opened the back door to let the heat out of the kitchen. The cold came in around my feet. I stood there in it a while.
Then I put on my slippers and walked down the drive to the mailbox.
The letters came off easier than I thought they would. I got the A and the R and the N, and the T took two tries. The D came last, crooked like it had always been, and it came off whole.
I put all five of them in my sweater pocket and went back up the drive.
I locked the back door with my new key, and I set the clock on the stove.
If this one got to you, send it to the woman you know who kept her own name and her own deed.
For more family betrayals over money and property, read about a grandson’s fiancée eyeing his late grandfather’s savings and a new husband who tried to “teach” his wife in her own home. There’s also the story of a brother moving money from their mother’s savings after borrowing from his sister.
