Nine days after my husband died, the hospice day nurse handed me his things and said, “His wife left her scarf here Tuesday, can you get it back to her?” I was his wife. We had burned $61,000 and a second mortgage trying to keep him alive, and some woman had been signing in as me.
Our daughter Noa is nine, and some nights she still sets three plates before she remembers.
Jason was forty-six.
Colon cancer, found in August, already in his liver by the time anybody said the word out loud.
We did everything they put in front of us.
The trial drug the insurance called experimental.
The second opinion three hours away.
The infusions that left him gray and shaking on the bathroom floor.
I cashed out my 401(k). I sold his bass boat to a guy from church for less than the trailer was worth.
Then I signed a second mortgage at our kitchen table with Noa doing spelling words next to me, because an oncologist had said there was one more thing worth trying.
There wasn’t.
He went into a hospice on the north side of Dubuque the second week of January and died there on a Sunday in February.
I worked at the title office until five every day, grabbed Noa from my mom’s, and got to his room by six.
So I never met the day shift.
That’s why I didn’t meet Shoshana until the morning I came for his bag.
She was young, purple scrubs, a lanyard with a cartoon taco on it.
She’d packed everything into a plastic drawstring bag with the hospice name printed on the side.
His reading glasses. His phone charger. Two crossword books, both half done in pen. The gray fleece I got him for Christmas.
And folded on top, a mustard-yellow knit scarf that smelled like somebody’s vanilla lotion.
“This isn’t his,” I said. “And it isn’t mine.”
Shoshana looked at the scarf, then at me, and her whole face changed.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I figured you were his sister.”
“Why would I be his sister?”
“Because his wife came on Tuesdays.” She was still half smiling. “She left that last week. She’d stay a couple hours every time.”
I put the scarf down on the counter.
“I’m his wife.”
The smile went first. Then her color.
“She signed in as spouse,” Shoshana said. “Every time. Nobody checks that.”
“Show me.”
She shouldn’t have. I know that. She turned the front desk tablet around anyway and scrolled the visitor log back with one finger.
Tuesday, 1:12 p.m. E. VANDERHOOF. Relationship: spouse.
Tuesday, 1:05 p.m. E. VANDERHOOF. Spouse.
Seven Tuesdays in a row.
My last name. Noa’s last name.
I didn’t know a single E.
I drove home with the bag on the passenger seat and the scarf shoved under the crossword books so I wouldn’t have to see it at red lights.
That night I went through his phone. The passcode was still Noa’s birthday.
His texts were cleared back to December. All of them, mine too.
The call log wasn’t. Every Monday night, the same number with no name, eleven or twelve minutes.
The night before every Tuesday.
I called it at two in the morning. It rang out to a robot voice reading the digits back to me.
The next day I called Kirk. He and Jason had bagged groceries together at nineteen.
“Did Jason ever mention a woman whose name starts with E?”
Kirk didn’t answer fast enough.
“Pris,” he said. “Let the man be dead in peace.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
He hung up. Kirk, who carried one corner of the casket.
For six days I ate saltines standing at the sink.
I kept going back to the fall, when Jason insisted on driving himself to his “Tuesday labs” and came home quiet and went straight out to the garage.
The envelope from the county in his truck console in October, which he said was about property tax.
How he made me promise, three days before the end, never to sell the house “no matter who tells you to.”
I’d blamed the morphine for that one.
Friday night, after Noa went to bed, I stood in the dark kitchen and said it to nobody.
“Were you fucking her the whole time I was paying for your chemo?”
Saturday at ten somebody knocked.
Noa got there first. She had the door open before I could stop her, and then she backed straight into me.
A woman stood on the porch. Mid-forties, tall, gray wool coat, no scarf.
She was holding a thick manila folder flat against her coat with both hands, like the wind might take it.
“You’re Priscilla,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Who are you?”
“Ebony.” She looked at Noa. “Can we do this without her?”
I sent Noa to her room. She went as far as the stairs and sat down. I let her.
“You signed in as his wife,” I said.
“I know.”
“Seven times.”
“Eight. The first time nobody was at the desk.”
I wanted to hit her. My hands were shaking too hard to aim.
“Were you sleeping with my husband?”
She almost laughed. She looked too tired to finish it.
“Not since 2004.”
Nobody on that porch moved.
“What does that MEAN, not since 2004?”
She opened the folder on the porch railing and turned it so I could read the top page.
County clerk. A raised seal. Jason’s signature, younger and rounder, but his.
A marriage certificate dated June of 2003.
The bride was Ebony Lowery.
“We never got divorced,” she said. “He swore he filed. He swore it again in December, when I found out where he was.”
Behind me I could hear Noa breathing on the stairs.
“Then WHO THE HELL AM I?” I said.
Ebony shut her eyes for a second.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “The bank called me Thursday, Priscilla. Not you. ME.”
Then she turned to the second page.
Page two
The second page had a blue backing sheet stapled to it, the kind lawyers use.
In the Iowa District Court for Dubuque County. In the Matter of the Estate of Jason R. Vanderhoof, Deceased.
A stamp in the corner said FILED, with the date of the Wednesday after he died. That Wednesday I was at the funeral home picking a casket spray off a laminated card.
Petitioner: Ebony L. Vanderhoof, surviving spouse.
Heirs: Ebony L. Vanderhoof, spouse. Noa Vanderhoof, minor child.
Real property: our address, typed out, with the lot number.
Under that was a line for other persons with an interest. Somebody had typed: Priscilla Vanderhoof, occupant.
Occupant. Like the junk mail.
I picked the folder up off the railing. I didn’t ask. I held it flat against my chest, the way she’d held it.
“The bank saw the filing,” Ebony said. “So they called me. They want to know who’s paying on the second loan. I didn’t sign it.”
“I signed it.”
“You signed it as his wife.” She said it gently, and that was worse. “The spouse gets the first share in Iowa. I looked it up. That house is about the only thing he had.”
“Noa lives here.”
Ebony looked past me at the stairs. Noa had her face pushed between two of the spindles.
“I’m not taking it from her,” Ebony said. “I’m taking it from you.”
Closing day, 2012
I’ve worked at the same title office on Locust Street since I was twenty-four. I do closings. I know what a deed says and what a deed does, and most people think those are the same thing.
When Jason and I bought this house, my boss Donald let me type our deed myself. He called it a wedding present. We’d been married eight months.
Married. I had a ring and a sheet cake and a photographer from Peosta who was mostly drunk. Jason had a gray suit he never wore again.
At the closing table he did a crossword in pen while the seller’s agent hunted through her purse for a notary stamp. He only ever did them in pen. When he finished one, he wrote the date in the margin and a few words about it. 3/9, house, P typed it.
He’d done that since before I met him. He said it was so he’d know which ones he’d already done, which made no sense, because the squares were filled in.
I typed the vesting line slow so I wouldn’t have to fix it.
Jason R. Vanderhoof and Priscilla A. Vanderhoof, husband and wife, as joint tenants with full rights of survivorship, and not as tenants in common.
“What’s survivorship?” he said.
“It means if one of us goes first, the other one doesn’t have to ask anybody for anything.”
He laughed and signed it. Younger and rounder. The same signature I’d just seen on a certificate from 2003, a year before he ever walked into the store where I bought my cigarettes back then.
The recorder’s office mails the original deed back after they put it on record. When ours came, I put it in the gray fire box on the closet shelf. Jason had a key too.
He paid the bills. All of them, out of the checking his paycheck went into, because he liked doing it, and I did paper all day and didn’t want to come home to more.
When the treatment started, I moved the 401(k) money into that account. Then the boat money. Then the mortgage draw. His name was on the hospital account. It was easier.
I never once opened a statement.
Ebony was still standing there with her hand out for the folder.
I shut the door on her and turned both locks.
Kirk’s garage
The deed was still in the gray box. I sat on the closet floor with it across my knees and read the vesting line until the words stopped being words.
Sunday I left Noa at my mom’s and drove to Kirk’s.
He had the garage door up and was working on a snowblower that didn’t need it. He saw my car and set the wrench on the seat.
“She came to the house,” I said.
He wiped his hands on a rag for a long time.
“I figured she might.”
“You know her.”
“I met her once. The summer of 2003, in Davenport. I drove him to the courthouse because his truck was in the shop.” He looked at the snowblower. “I was the witness. I was twenty-four. I thought it was funny.”
“Did you know he never divorced her?”
“No.” Then, “Not till September.”
There was an oil stain on his floor shaped like nothing at all. I kept my eyes on it.
“She called the store in September,” Kirk said. “I’m still there. Night manager. Twenty-some years nobody knew where he went, and she found me in about a day. She said she needed his signature on some paperwork. Said she wanted it finished. I gave her his cell.”
September.
On my porch, Ebony had said December.
“And the Tuesday labs started,” I said.
Kirk didn’t say yes. He didn’t have to.
“Did you tell her he died?”
“She called me that Sunday night. I was in the hospice parking lot. I didn’t think.” He put the rag down. “Pris. Sign whatever she wants. Keep Noa out of a courtroom.”
“She wants the house, Kirk.”
He picked the wrench back up and looked at it like it was new.
“Then let her have the goddamn house,” he said.
Donald’s left monitor
Donald is sixty-eight and has done closings in this county for forty years. He has two monitors and only trusts the left one.
Monday morning I pulled our property in the county index. I do it twenty times a day for strangers.
There was our deed from 2012. The first mortgage. The second one from November, my signature next to his, his already going crooked.
And a line I didn’t put there.
Affidavit, claim of interest. Ebony L. Vanderhoof. Prepared by T. Brandt, attorney, Davenport. Recorded 8:14 a.m. on the Monday.
The day after he died.
At 8:14 that Monday I was sitting on the edge of our bed holding his phone, waiting for the funeral home to open at nine.
She’d already had a lawyer. She’d already had our lot number.
I printed it and walked it into Donald’s office. He read it with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, which means he isn’t really reading.
“This is a notice,” he said. “It says she thinks she has a claim. Anybody can record a notice. My ex-brother-in-law recorded one on a boat.”
“Does she have a claim?”
He tapped our deed with a pen. “Joint tenancy. When he died, his half went to you that minute. It never went into any estate. She can probate his truck.”
“It says husband and wife.”
“That’s a description. It’s not a condition.” He let the glasses drop onto his nose. “Unless her lawyer says you got on that deed by fraud. Then it’s a fight. Then it’s money you don’t have.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t. A judge doesn’t know you.”
I went back to my desk and called the credit union that holds the second loan. I’ve closed a hundred loans with those people. The woman who picked up wouldn’t discuss anything but my half of the note.
“There’s been a concern raised about the borrowers’ information,” she said.
“Raised by who?”
“A family member of the deceased.”
“I’m the family member.”
“Ma’am, I can’t.”
When I got home there was a sticky note on the storm door glass, in neat capitals.
SATURDAY 10. I’LL NEED A KEY. E.
The September crossword
That night Noa did her spelling at the kitchen table, in the same chair she’d been in when I signed the second mortgage. I had the hospice bag open beside her for the first time since I’d brought it home.
I took the crossword books out. I put the scarf in the trash. Then I took it out of the trash and put it on the counter.
Noa pulled one of the books over. “Can I finish Daddy’s?”
“In pencil.”
She flipped through it, licking her finger at every page the way my mother does. Every finished puzzle had his date in the margin, the way it always had.
Then she turned the book toward me.
“Why does it say money?”
9/16 E 2,500.
9/23 E 2,500.
10/7 E 2,500.
Tuesdays. Every one.
I took the book out of her hands. The fall entries were neat. In the January book the pen dragged, and the letters leaned into each other. 1/20 E 2500 ck. The last one was dated the Tuesday before he died, the week of the scarf. Under it was a number circled twice.
27,500.
I’d never logged into that checking account. I sat on the floor with my back against the dishwasher and tried Noa’s birthday.
It worked.
Cash withdrawals at the branch on Central Avenue, every Tuesday in the fall, $2,500, the morning after a Monday call. Then nothing for two weeks around Christmas. Then checks.
I opened the pictures of the checks. Pay to the order of Ebony Lowery. His signature shook so hard the J came out as two letters.
There was writing on the memo line of the last one.
Last one. Leave them alone.
Twenty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. Out of the account I’d been filling with my 401(k) and his boat and our house.
I added it in my head again because I do that for a living, and it came out the same.
Noa had come around the table and was reading the screen over my shoulder.
“Mom,” she said. “Who’s E?”
The kitchen table
Saturday at ten I had Noa at my mom’s and the kitchen table set up like a closing.
The original deed with the recorder’s stamp. The affidavit of surviving joint tenant that Donald had recorded for me Friday at 4:40, ten minutes before the office closed. The bank printouts with the check pictures. The September crossword book, open.
Ebony knocked once and I let her in. She didn’t take her coat off. She looked at the deed first and the crossword book last.
“That doesn’t change what you are,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“He married me first. Davenport courthouse, his buddy for a witness, hot dogs after at a stand on River Drive. Six months later he took a job in Dubuque and stopped picking up. I had a car loan with his name on it. I had his Visa calling me until 2009. I had a lease I couldn’t break.” She sat down. “Nobody cashed out a 401(k) for me.”
I slid the crossword book an inch toward her.
She looked at it a long time.
“He wrote it down,” she said. “Of course he wrote it down.”
“It was my 401(k).”
“It was his debt.” Her voice went up for the first time. “You want to know what Tuesdays were? I’d sit in that chair and tell him what I’d tell the county attorney. Two wives. What that makes your girl on paper. And he’d write me a check without looking at me, and then he’d hold out that book and ask me for seventeen across. Every week. Like we were waiting on a bus together.”
“You signed in as his wife.”
“I am his wife. That was the only thing I had to sign with.”
She pushed the bank printouts back across to me without reading them.
“And the credit union,” she said. “That was me too. I called them Thursday morning, an hour before they called me back. I told them the woman on that loan wasn’t married to anybody. People sell when the bank calls. I figured you’d sell.”
“He told me not to,” I said. “No matter who told me to.”
She stopped.
“He said that.”
“Three days before.”
“Then he knew it’d be me saying it.” She laughed, and it wasn’t much of one.
I turned the affidavit around so she could read it. It says the joint tenant died and the survivor owns it. There’s a box for how you were related. I’d crossed out the word spouse. Next to marital status I’d written single, and I’d initialed it, and Donald had notarized it with his face doing nothing.
“The house was mine the minute he died,” I said. “Withdraw the notice. Call the credit union and tell them what you told them. And I don’t take these checks to the county attorney.”
“You’d lose. He wrote every one of those himself.”
“Maybe.”
“You still owe the bank the whole second loan. By yourself.”
“I know.”
“And the twenty-seven five?”
“Keep it.”
She looked at the word single for a while.
“That’s what they made you write,” she said.
“I wrote it.”
Ebony stood up and put her folder under her arm. At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob.
“Tell her I’m sorry about the stairs,” she said, and she went out and pulled the storm door shut behind her.
Tuesday in March
Donald put a printout on my desk on a Tuesday in March and walked off without saying anything.
Release of claim. Recorded 9:02 a.m. She’d signed it Ebony L. Lowery.
The credit union sent me a new payment coupon book a week later, with only my name on it.
That night Noa set the table. Three plates. She stood there with the third one in her hands for a second, and then she put it back in the cupboard and closed the door with her hip.
After she went up, I took the yellow scarf off the hook by the back door, where it had been hanging for a month because I couldn’t decide anything about it.
I folded it into a padded envelope and copied the Davenport address off the petition.
Then I wrote E. LOWERY on the front, walked it down to the mailbox, and put the flag up.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has ever signed something at a kitchen table because the person they loved needed them to.
For more stories about family secrets and the people who take advantage of trust, read the notebook that revealed where a missing boy went and the son-in-law who sent a lawyer his own account number. There’s also the son who put a $46,500 supper-club bill on his mother’s name.
