My husband told me he’d be in Boise for three days, so I didn’t expect to hear his voice in the next booth an hour before I signed for my father’s orchard. He was with my best friend. “She signs whatever I slide across,” he said, “and half of four hundred grand is ours.” So I sent them a gift.
My father died in March and left me forty acres of pear trees, the house he built with his own hands, and a tractor older than I am.
Jeremy and I had been married nineteen years.
Kylie had been my best friend for eleven, ever since she rented the apartment under ours and knocked on the ceiling with a broom because our dog barked.
She also worked at the title company handling Dad’s estate.
That was supposed to be the good part.
“I’ll check every page myself,” she said at the funeral, holding both my hands in hers. “Garland would want somebody watching out for you.”
I believed her. I cried on her shoulder in the church parking lot.
Tuesday at five in the morning Jeremy kissed my forehead and threw his garment bag in the truck.
“Boise till Thursday night,” he said. “Text me the second you sign.”
He sells irrigation equipment. He’s gone a lot. I never once thought about it.
Thursday I drove up to Wenatchee early because I couldn’t sleep.
The signing was at two.
I had an hour and a half and a box on the passenger seat.
The box was for Kylie. Dad’s last bottle of the pear brandy he made every fall in the shed, wrapped in one of Mom’s old dish towels, with a card I’d rewritten three times.
I didn’t trust the lock on my car, so I carried it into the diner across from the title office with me.
The waitress put me in the last booth by the kitchen. The pie case next to it hummed like a refrigerator from 1985 and there was a calendar on the wall still turned to June.
I sat with my back to the room and ordered coffee I didn’t want.
Then somebody laughed on the other side of the wood.
I know that laugh.
Nineteen years I’ve known that laugh.
It was six inches behind my head.
“Relax,” Jeremy said. “She’s not going to read it.”
“It’s forty pages,” Kylie said. “I put the quitclaim at twenty-six. Between the water rights and the septic.”
“She’ll sign it. She signed our refinance without looking up from her phone.”
He was supposed to be in BOISE.
I didn’t turn around. I put my phone on the table, opened the voice memos with one thumb, and pressed the red button.
“Once my name’s on that deed it’s marital,” Jeremy said. “I file in the spring. Half of four-ten. Two hundred and five.”
“And I get my sixty.”
“You get your sixty, baby.”
Baby.
In nineteen years he had never called me that. Not ONCE.
Kylie said, “What if she asks why your name’s on page twenty-six?”
“Then you tell her it’s STANDARD. Tell her the estate lawyer wanted it. She trusts you way more than she trusts me.”
They both laughed at that one.
My hands were flat on the table. The coffee had a skin on it.
The waitress came back. Her name tag said Carolyn. She asked if I wanted pie and I said no.
Then I said, “Can you do something for me?”
I slid the box across to her.
“The booth behind me,” I said. “Gray quarter-zip, and the woman with the claw clip. Give them this. Tell them it’s from the lady behind them.”
Carolyn looked at the bottle. Then she looked at my face, and she didn’t ask me a single thing.
I took the card back out first.
On the front it said, For Kylie, for watching out for me. Dad would have liked you.
Under that, with the diner’s pen, I wrote one more line in capitals.
PAGE TWENTY-SIX. ENJOY BOISE.
Then I sat there with the phone still recording and listened.
I heard the box go down on their table.
I heard Carolyn say, “From the lady behind you.”
I heard Kylie say, “Oh my God, that’s so sweet, who…”
Then nothing.
Not a fork. Not a cup.
Just the card. Somebody opening it.
“Jer,” Kylie said. Very quiet.
The wood wall behind my back moved, because a grown man had just turned around on his knees on the seat to look over the top of it.
I didn’t look up.
I could see his hands on the edge above me. His wedding ring.
“Angelique,” he said. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Since page twenty-six,” I said.
Kylie was already on her feet with her lanyard in one fist and her phone in the other.
“Don’t do anything fucking stupid,” Jeremy said. “We’ll talk about this at home.”
I looked at my screen. Eleven minutes, forty seconds.
Across the street, the title office had its blinds half down. Masao Shim owned it. Kylie had worked for him six years.
Dad gave me Masao’s cell number on a napkin the week before he died. He said, “In case anybody gets cute.”
The napkin was still in my wallet.
I stopped the recording.
I had one bar of signal, an eleven-minute file and a phone number in my father’s handwriting.
Jeremy started climbing over the booth.
I hit send.
One bar
It went to Masao Shim. The eleven-minute file, and under it one line I typed with my thumb while my husband got a knee onto the top of the divider.
This is Garland Hunt’s daughter. Page 26. Signing at 2.
The little bar crawled across the bottom of the screen. Jeremy’s shoe hit the sugar caddy and it went over and the packets went everywhere.
Delivered.
“Sir,” Carolyn said.
She was standing at the end of my booth with the coffee pot in her hand, not pouring anything. Just holding it.
“You’re going to want to get off my table.”
He looked at the pot. He looked at the two old men at the counter, who had turned all the way around on their stools. Then he backed down the way he came, on his side, and the whole booth creaked when he landed.
Through the front window I could see Kylie crossing the street without looking. She had the box under her arm. My dad’s brandy, in my mom’s dish towel, going into the side door of the title office with the woman who put page twenty-six in the stack.
She took the gift.
I don’t know why that was the part that made my eyes sting.
The napkin was on the table next to my cup, where I’d flattened it to read the number. It was white, the cheap kind, and it had the diner’s name printed in red in one corner. Same red as the menu.
I’d carried it seven months and never once looked at that.
My phone buzzed.
Received. Do not sign anything. Stay where you are. Is Carolyn working?
The napkin
The week before he died, Dad was still driving. Nobody could stop him and I quit trying.
He had a bad heart, and by then everybody knew how it was going to go, him included. He drove himself into Wenatchee on a Thursday to see Masao about the will, because Masao had done the papers when he bought the forty acres in 1979 and Dad didn’t trust anybody else with paper.
“Masao reads every page,” he told me once. “Nobody reads every page anymore.”
That was the thing with Dad and paper. Anything he signed, he put his initials in the bottom corner of every single page first. GH, GH, GH, all the way through. A forty-page anything took him twenty minutes.
When I was sixteen he made me do it on my first car loan.
“So nobody can slip one in,” he said.
I did it on every paper I signed until I married Jeremy. Jeremy thought it was hilarious. He’d stand behind me at the bank going GH, GH, GH in Dad’s voice until the loan officer laughed too. So at some point I quit. I couldn’t tell you when.
Kylie, though. Kylie was the one who showed up.
When Dad’s heart got bad she drove him to every appointment I couldn’t make, which was most of them, because I work in Ellensburg and the cardiologist was in Wenatchee, two blocks from her office. She’d take her lunch and sit in the waiting room with him. She brought him those pear tarts from the bakery on the corner and he’d tell her they weren’t as good as Mom’s and eat both.
“That girl’s all right,” he said at Christmas. Then he said, “Does Jeremy still do the Boise run every week?”
I said yeah, Tuesdays to Thursdays, why.
He said, “No reason,” and asked me to pass the rolls.
At Christmas, too, Jeremy asked him how many acre-feet of water came with the place. Dad told him. I remember thinking it was nice, the two of them talking about something.
Then that last Thursday, Dad came out to the truck where I’d been waiting in the lot and handed me the napkin, folded twice.
“In case anybody gets cute,” he said.
I asked him who.
He said, “Anybody,” and got in the passenger side, which he never did, and asked me to drive him home.
He died eight days later in the chair by the woodstove.
I put the napkin in my wallet behind my license and I never asked him what he meant, because there was no one left to ask.
And now Masao Shim was asking me about the waitress.
I looked up. Carolyn was picking sugar packets off the floor.
Jeremy was sliding into my booth, across from me, like it was his.
Washington is a two-party state
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “Let’s talk about what you think you heard.”
He had his hands folded on the table. He’d shaved. He smelled like the hotel soap from whatever hotel he wasn’t in.
I put the phone face down under my hand.
“You know what you just did?” he said. “Washington’s a two-party state. You record somebody without telling them, that’s a crime. That’s a felony, Angie. And you just sent it to her boss. You just sent a felony to a business owner.”
He didn’t call me Angelique when he wanted something. He called me Angie.
“We were joking around. Kylie and me. It’s a stupid bit we do. You’d know that if you ever paid attention to anything that wasn’t your dad.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look at you. You’re not okay. You haven’t been okay since March. Anybody would understand that. You sit in a diner, you hear half of something, you make a whole movie out of it.” He leaned in. “Delete it, and I’ll forget about the card.”
“Honey.”
Carolyn had come back with a rag. She wiped the sugar off my side of the table and didn’t look at him.
“I heard you from the register,” she said. “Everybody in here heard you. You were loud the last time too.”
Jeremy turned and looked at her for the first time.
“Excuse me?”
She went back to the kitchen.
He looked at the door she’d gone through for a long second. Then he took his keys out of his pocket and set them on the table, which is what he does when he’s done talking and wants me to know it.
“I’m going to go across the street and fix this,” he said. “And you’re going to come at two, and sign your papers, and we’re going to go home and have a normal conversation like adults.”
He stood up and put a five on the table for his coffee. He took his keys.
“See you at two,” he said.
The bell over the door went.
The last time too.
Thirty-eight pages
Masao called at twenty after twelve. He was quiet on the phone, the way old men are when they’re in a room they don’t want to be overheard in.
“Mrs. Wieland. Is your husband still with you?”
“He just left. He’s coming over there.”
“I know. I can see him in my lobby.” A door closed on his end. “I listened to the whole thing. Twice. I want you to understand something first. I reviewed your father’s estate packet myself, last Friday. I signed off on it.”
“Okay.”
“I signed off on thirty-eight pages.”
I didn’t say anything. I could hear him breathing.
“The stack in Kylie’s folder this morning is forty. Two pages were added Tuesday afternoon, after I approved it. A quitclaim, and an acknowledgment for it. She notarized the acknowledgment herself. It’s already stamped. All it needs is your name.”
Tuesday afternoon. Jeremy was in Boise Tuesday afternoon.
“There’s something else,” Masao said. “And I’m sorry, but you should hear it from me before you walk in here.”
He told me that after he got my text he went into the system and pulled every search anybody in his office had ever run on your father’s forty acres. His words. Your father’s forty acres.
There were three. The one he ran in 1979. The one he ran for the will.
And one run on February twelfth, under Kylie’s login, with no order number attached.
“There’s no file for it,” he said. “Nobody asked for it. It’s a vesting search. It tells you who owns a piece of land and what it’s worth and what’s against it. It’s the first thing you’d pull if you wanted to know what was coming to someone.”
February twelfth.
Dad had an appointment February twelfth. I know because I couldn’t make it, and Kylie took him, and she texted me a picture of him in the waiting room holding up a pear tart like a trophy.
He was alive. He was sitting right there next to her.
“She ran it from the cardiologist’s,” I said. I don’t know how I knew that. I just knew where she’d been.
Masao didn’t say anything for a while.
“Stay in the diner a few more minutes,” he said. “Then come at two, like nothing’s wrong. And Mrs. Wieland. Ask Carolyn about the pie.”
The last booth
Carolyn came out from the kitchen with a plate and put it down in front of me. Pear pie. A big piece, still warm, with the fork laid across the top.
“I said I didn’t want any.”
“I know what you said.” She sat down across from me, in the spot where Jeremy had been, and put her hands around a cup of coffee that was hers. “I’m on break.”
She looked at the napkin on the table.
“That’s my napkin,” she said. “Your dad wrote that in this booth. I gave him the pen.”
I didn’t move.
“He came in the first week of March. Sat right there where you’re sitting, back to the room. He liked the pear pie, he said ours was too sweet, he ate it anyway.” She turned her cup. “He’d been in maybe four times before, with Masao. Never by himself.”
Behind me, the booth was empty now. I could feel it.
“Those two came in behind him. They come in Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every week, a year and a half, maybe. Lunch, two hours. She always gets the soup. He always calls her baby when I bring the check.”
Tuesdays and Thursdays. Boise till Thursday night.
“Your dad sat there the whole two hours. He didn’t eat. He didn’t turn around. When they left, he asked me if they came in a lot, and I told him. And then he asked me for a pen and a napkin, and he asked me if I’d call Masao and tell him to come across the street. So I did.”
“Masao came here.”
“Sat with him till almost three. They didn’t eat either.” She looked at the pie. “When Masao went back, your dad stayed and wrote on that napkin a long time. Wrote something, tore it up. Wrote something, tore it up. That’s the one he kept.”
I picked up the napkin and turned it over.
Nothing on the back. Just the number, and Masao’s name above it, and the red print in the corner.
Seven months. He knew for eight days and he couldn’t figure out how to tell me, so he gave me a phone number and asked me to drive him home.
“He asked me one more thing,” Carolyn said. “On his way out. He said, if my girl ever comes in here with those two, you call Masao.”
She drank some of her coffee.
“You didn’t come in with them,” she said. “You came in behind them. I figured that counted.”
“Why didn’t you say something? When I gave you the box?”
“Because you’d already done it, honey.” She stood up and picked up my cold coffee. “Eat your pie. You’ve got paper to sign.”
Two o’clock
Masao’s conference room had a long table, the blinds half down, and a box of tissues nobody touched.
Jeremy was already in there. So was Kylie, in the chair by the window, with her lanyard off and on the table in front of her. The box with the brandy was on the floor by her feet.
Masao had the stack in front of him, squared up. Forty pages.
He slid it across to me. He didn’t say anything. He put a pen on top of it.
“This is insane,” Jeremy said. “Masao, I’m sorry, but this is insane. She’s been through a lot. Her dad just died. She heard a couple of us goofing around and she’s built this whole conspiracy, and you’re going along with it, and frankly I think you’re exposing yourself here.”
I picked up the pen.
“Page twenty-six is a standard form. Kylie can tell you. It’s a standard spousal thing, people do it all the time, it protects both of us if something happens to her. That’s all it is. It’s insurance.”
I put GH in the bottom corner of page one.
Then I stopped, and crossed it out, and wrote AW.
“What is she doing?” Jeremy said.
Page two. AW. Page three. AW.
“Angie. What are you doing?”
“She’s initialing,” Masao said.
I went through the water rights. Three pages of acre-feet and priority dates. AW, AW, AW. Jeremy watched every one of them.
“You know that recording’s illegal, right? You know you can’t use any of it? I’ll have a lawyer on the phone in ten minutes, Masao, and you’ll be explaining why you passed around a felony to your whole office.”
Page twenty-five. AW.
Page twenty-six had his name on it, typed, under GRANTEE. Jeremy Wieland, a married man. Below it was the line for my signature.
I took it out of the stack and set it face up in front of Masao.
Then page twenty-seven, the acknowledgment, with Kylie’s stamp already pressed into it and her signature in blue ink. I set that on top.
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “Okay. Let’s everybody slow down.”
Page twenty-eight. The septic. AW.
“Kylie wrote that page,” Jeremy said. “I want that on the record, if we’re doing records now. I didn’t know what a quitclaim was until she told me. I’m in irrigation. She came to me with this. She said it was nothing, she said it happens all the time.”
Kylie turned from the window.
“You told me what to put on it,” she said. “You told me where to put it. You said she wouldn’t look up from her phone.”
“I never said that.”
“It’s on the RECORDING, Jer.”
“And who made the recording?” He pointed at me without looking at me. “Her. Illegally. In a public restaurant.”
Masao folded his hands.
“Mr. Wieland, nobody in this room needs your recording,” he said. “I have a quitclaim deed nobody in this office ordered, notarized by my employee, added to a file after I closed my review. I have a vesting search on a living man’s land with no order behind it. That’s enough. I called the Department of Financial Institutions at one o’clock. Kylie, I’ll need your keys.”
Kylie put her keys on the table next to her lanyard. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t look at Jeremy.
“You said sixty,” she said to him. “You said it was nothing.”
“I said a lot of things,” Jeremy said.
That was it. That was the whole face. Nineteen years and he gave her up in one sentence and went back to looking at me.
“So what,” he said. “You think you get the orchard and the house? You think you just walk out of here with all of it?”
I signed the last page. Angelique Wieland. I dated it.
Then I turned the napkin face up on the table where he could see Masao’s number in Dad’s writing, and the red print in the corner. The diner’s name.
He looked at it a long time.
“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I said.
The pie case
I gave him the house in Ellensburg.
All of it, the equity too, so he’d sign by June and there’d be no spring. My lawyer said I was leaving sixty thousand dollars on the table. I told her I knew the number.
The deed recorded that Monday with one name on it.
I live in Dad’s house now. The tractor starts on the third try.
Kylie lost her license. She moved to Spokane, I heard. She left the box on the floor of Masao’s conference room, and Masao carried it out to my truck himself and didn’t say anything about it.
The next October I drove up to Wenatchee on a Thursday, early, because I couldn’t sleep.
The pie case still hums. Carolyn put me in the last booth by the kitchen and I sat with my back to the room. The booth behind me was empty. Nobody laughed.
I had a box on the seat beside me. Mom’s dish towel. Dad’s last bottle, with the seal still on it, and a card I only had to write once.
When Carolyn came with the coffee, I slid it across the table to her.
“From the lady in the last booth,” I said.
If someone you love signs where they’re told to sign, tell them about GH in the corner of every page.
For more family secrets and paperwork with a sting, read the fridge letter my husband tried to hide and the nine lines my mother left behind. And for another tense family-table reveal, see the envelope my daughter waited three days to hand me.
