While I spent seven weeks in a rehab bed learning to walk on a new knee, my older sister moved two strangers into my house and took $700 a month from them for it. When I called her, she said, “You weren’t using it, Maura. Somebody might as well.” So I signed myself out four days early and went home to see who was in my bed.
I found out from the doorbell camera.
Mr. Tolbert across the street put the app on my phone after the break-ins on our block last fall, and I’d never once opened it.
But after nine o’clock the TV at the rehab center in Muncie only had a man selling knife sets, and the woman in the next bed slept with her mouth open.
So I opened it.
At 9:41 on a Tuesday night, a young woman I’d never seen carried a laundry basket up my front steps.
Behind her an old man took the steps one at a time, with a hand on my railing.
She had a key.
I watched it four times.
Then I called Catherine, because Catherine was the only other person alive with a key to that house.
She picked up on the first ring, the way she does when she’s been expecting you.
“Oh, those are the Lehmanns,” she said. “Ernie and his granddaughter. They lost their apartment.”
“So they’re in MY house?”
“You weren’t using it, Maura. Somebody might as well.”
“Catherine, I’m on a walker.”
“And you’ve got four bedrooms and nobody in them,” she said. “Mom didn’t raise us to sit on empty rooms.”
Then she hung up on me.
I didn’t sleep.
At seven the next morning I told the day nurse I was going home.
She said I still had four days of therapy on the schedule.
I said I’d do them on my own damn stairs.
Mr. Tolbert picked me up at noon in his truck and didn’t ask one question the whole way, which is the nicest thing he’s ever done for me.
There was a gray hatchback in my driveway with a taillight taped over in red.
The bottom porch step, the loose one I’d asked Catherine to call somebody about since last summer, didn’t move under the walker.
Somebody had screwed it down.
The front door opened before I got my key out.
The old man stood there in a flannel shirt with a dish towel over his shoulder.
He looked at the walker and backed up to make room for it.
“You’re Maura,” he said. “Your sister said you might not be up for visiting yet.”
“Visiting,” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
My kitchen smelled like onions.
There was a pot on my stove and a pill organizer that wasn’t mine next to the toaster.
My tomato plants, which I’d left for dead, were lined up on the sill and full of red ones.
A girl came in from the hall with wet hair and stopped dead.
She was maybe twenty-four, still in a grocery store polo with a name tag on it.
“Oh God,” she said. “I’m Angelica. Ma’am, I swear we can explain.”
“I’d love that.”
She went straight to the drawer where I keep the batteries and the rubber bands and took out a spiral notebook.
She already knew which drawer.
Inside, in round careful handwriting, were dates and amounts.
March first, $700. April first, $700. Cash, handed over in my driveway.
Next to each one, Catherine had written her initials like a landlord.
“She said you’d want it on paper,” Angelica said.
Fourteen hundred dollars.
My sister has never once in her life brought me a casserole.
“She told us you were going to a place,” Ernie said. “Assisted living. She said she’d be handling the house after.”
“After what?”
He looked at the floor.
Angelica answered for him. “After you didn’t come back.”
I had to sit down.
She must have texted her, because twenty minutes later Catherine’s white SUV pulled in behind the hatchback.
I don’t blame the girl. I’d have texted somebody too.
Catherine came in my back door without knocking, sunglasses up on her head, her keys still in her hand.
She looked at the walker before she looked at me.
“Well, look who’s up,” she said. “Good. Then you can see for yourself you don’t need all this room.”
“You took their money.”
“I took rent. For your property taxes. Somebody in this family has to think ahead.”
“You told them I wasn’t coming home.”
“I told them you’d never manage those stairs again, which is true, and I’ve already had a man from the realty office walk through—”
That’s when I stopped being polite.
“YOU TOLD THEM I WAS NEVER COMING HOME, CATHERINE.”
Angelica put a hand on her grandfather’s arm.
Catherine didn’t even blink.
“And where were they supposed to go?” she said. “You’ve got a dead man’s recliner in a den nobody’s sat in for four years. Don’t make this about you.”
Nobody said anything.
The faucet dripped twice.
Then Angelica went down the hall, and I heard the guest room dresser drawers sliding open.
She came back with the laundry basket from the video, full again.
“We’ll be out by tonight,” she said. “Grandpa, get your pills.”
Ernie didn’t move.
He was standing in the doorway of the den, looking at the picture on the shelf over my husband’s chair.
The one from the lake, the summer before he got sick.
“Ma’am,” he said. “That’s your husband?”
I said it was.
He went in and set the dish towel down on the arm of the recliner very carefully, like it might break.
“Then your sister didn’t find us,” he said. “I found her. I asked her for this house.”
The dish towel
“You asked her,” I said.
“For this house. Yes, ma’am.” He kept one hand on the towel. “Your husband told me once that if I was ever without a roof, I was to come knock on this door. In February I didn’t have a roof. So I knocked.”
Catherine was already shaking her head.
“He had a card,” she said. “Some little card with your husband’s writing on it, older than that girl. That man promised everybody everything, Maura. You know he did.”
I pushed the walker toward the den.
The front legs caught on the metal strip where the kitchen floor stops and the carpet starts, and I had to lift it and set it down three times. Nobody helped. I was glad nobody helped.
The recliner still had his dent in it.
“Where’s the card?” I said.
Ernie looked at Catherine.
Catherine looked at her phone. She keeps the screen turned up so bright you can read it across a room, and she held it the way she holds everything, like a receipt she plans to bring back.
“Abby from the realty office will be here at four to take the listing pictures,” she said. “So let’s not have a scene.”
August 1979
We bought this house the summer I was twenty-one.
It had four bedrooms because we were going to need four bedrooms. That was the plan, and the plan didn’t happen, and after a while we stopped talking about it and just kept the rooms.
The bank wouldn’t take my husband alone that year. He’d been laid off from the plant for six months and called back in May, and the man at the bank said six months was six months.
So we asked Catherine and her husband to co-sign.
They had a new Buick in the driveway that summer, cream with a brown vinyl roof. Catherine stood next to it with her hand on the hood and told us they were stretched.
Two weeks later my husband came up the walk with the bank papers in a big envelope and sat down next to me on the bottom porch step.
“Taken care of,” he said.
“By who?”
“A guy from the plant. Don’t worry about it.”
I asked twice more that year. Then the payments came out of our account like anybody else’s, and you stop asking about a thing that’s working.
That step went loose every spring. He’d sit on the porch with a Folgers can full of screws between his feet and fix it, and every spring he said the same thing. “A house tells you who’s paying attention.”
He died four years ago, and the step went loose, and I asked Catherine to call somebody.
Catherine is good with paper. When he died she took over my bills and kept them in an accordion file with colored tabs, and she has never in her life thrown a piece of paper away. In my second week at rehab she came in with a clipboard, between my pudding cup and my pain pill, and said, “Sign here and here, it’s for the insurance.”
I signed where the yellow flags were. I’d have signed a menu.
When I got the walker back over the strip into the kitchen, the Folgers can was on the counter next to Ernie’s pills.
“Found his screws out in the garage,” Ernie said. “I hope that’s all right.”
There were maybe ten left in the can.
Fourteen stairs
Catherine wanted the Lehmanns out before four. She said it like she was doing them a favor.
“Angelica, honey, leave the sheets, I’ll run them through. Ernie, don’t forget your blood pressure ones.”
Angelica didn’t move toward the hall. She was looking at me.
“Ma’am, I want you to know we never went upstairs,” she said. “Not once. Grandpa’s in the guest room and I’ve been on your couch. Your sister said upstairs was off limits.”
“Because there’s nothing up there for anybody,” Catherine said. “Maura, you can’t even get up there. That’s the whole point. Twelve stairs.”
There are fourteen. I’ve counted them every night for forty-seven years with a laundry basket on my hip.
I parked the walker against the newel post and took the railing in both hands.
The therapist at rehab had a little set of practice stairs, four of them, with a platform on top where you turned around and came back down. Up with the good, down with the bad. She said it so many times I said it in my sleep.
Up with the good.
Catherine said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”
Angelica came up behind me, two steps down, with her hands out and not touching me. She didn’t say a word. Ernie stood at the bottom with the dish towel back on his shoulder.
Five. I stopped and breathed.
Eight. My knee felt like somebody had packed it with gravel.
Eleven, and Catherine said, “If you fall, I’m not the one who’s going to explain it to the hospital.”
Fourteen.
The upstairs hall smelled like nobody lived there.
My bedroom door was shut. I’ve never shut that door in my life.
Abby
There was nobody in my bed.
There wasn’t a bed, not the way I’d left it. The mattress was bare. My quilt was folded on the cedar chest with a sticky note on it that said KEEP? in green marker, question mark and all.
My closet was empty. My clothes were in boxes along the wall, eleven of them, taped shut and labeled in the same green marker. Two said KEEP. The rest said GOODWILL.
One of them said SHOES/PURSES/MISC.
Angelica stopped in the doorway. “I swear to God I didn’t know about this.”
I believed her. She was holding on to the door frame.
There was a business card stuck in the corner of my dresser mirror, where I keep the prayer card from my mother’s funeral. A realty office on McGalliard. Abby, and a cell number.
I called it sitting on the edge of my bare mattress.
Abby was very nice. She said she was looking forward to meeting me at four.
I said she wasn’t coming at four, and I wasn’t selling my house.
She got careful.
“Mrs. Vanderlinden, I’m going off the paperwork your sister gave us,” she said. “She’s acting for you under a power of attorney. It’s dated March fifth, it’s notarized. The listing goes live Friday.”
“I never signed a power of attorney.”
“It was notarized at the facility,” she said. “They have a notary on staff. I can email you a copy.”
I don’t have email on that phone.
I came back down the stairs on my bottom, one at a time, the way they teach you when down-with-the-bad isn’t working. It took a long time. Nobody said anything about it.
Catherine was at my kitchen table with a manila folder in front of her and her reading glasses on.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “You were on oxycodone and crying about your tomato plants, Maura. Somebody had to be able to sign for you.”
“You told me it was the insurance.”
“It covers the insurance.”
Ernie had his coat on now. Angelica’s basket was by the back door. But Ernie didn’t go to the door. He pulled out the chair across from Catherine and sat down in it.
“I’m not leaving before she’s had a look,” he said.
Catherine turned the folder around and pushed it across the table at me.
“It’s all legal,” she said. “Go ahead. Read every word.”
The index card
The power of attorney was on top, eight pages with the yellow flags still stuck to them. My name was on the last page in handwriting that went downhill.
Under it was the listing agreement. $214,000. Under that, a sheet of lined paper in Catherine’s printing that said LEHMANN, with March and April and the amounts, the same as the notebook in my battery drawer.
Clipped to the back of that sheet was an index card.
It was the old kind, soft at the corners, with a coffee ring on one side. The ink had gone brown.
I know that handwriting. It’s on the lids of every Mason jar in my basement and on every birthday card I got for thirty-seven years. His n’s never close at the top.
Ernie,
You put your name on my house when the bank wouldn’t take mine and my own family wouldn’t either. I won’t forget it. If you’re ever without a roof, there’s a room here for you, no charge, as long as there’s a house. Show this to Maura and she’ll make up the bed.
A.
Aug. 1979
I read it twice. I turned it over. There was just the coffee ring.
“My own family,” I said.
Catherine took her glasses off.
“It’s forty-seven years old, Maura.”
“You read it.”
“Of course I read it. He handed it to me on your porch.”
Ernie was looking at his hands on my table. Big hands with brown spots, and a cut across one knuckle that had healed white.
“I gave it to her so she’d give it to you,” he said. “She said you were in no shape. She said she’d see you got it.”
“I was going to,” Catherine said.
I held the card up, so she had to look at it.
“When?” I said. “After Friday?”
She didn’t answer. She reached across the table for the card.
I put my hand flat on it first.
The battery drawer
I got up, which took the edge of the table and both hands, and went to the drawer with the batteries and the rubber bands.
The notebook was where Angelica had put it back. I turned past March and past April to a clean page and sat back down.
Catherine talked the whole time I wrote.
“Oh, here we go. You think you can write yourself out of this on a grocery list? That’s a legal document, Maura. You need a lawyer. You need a notary. You need somebody who can stand up in a courtroom without a walker, and that isn’t you, and it sure isn’t him.”
I wrote it slow so it would be readable.
I, Maura Vanderlinden, take back the power of attorney I signed on March 5. Nobody signs for me. Nobody sells this house.
I put the date under it and signed it. Then I turned the notebook around and held the pen out to Ernie.
He signed. Angelica signed under him and printed her name next to it, because she’s the kind who prints her name.
“And who’s going to be here when the furnace goes?” Catherine said. “Who’s paying for your next knee? I found you a place, Maura. It has a pool. It has a chapel. I gave up two Saturdays driving out there to look at it.”
My phone buzzed on the table. The doorbell app. A woman in a blazer on my porch with a camera bag, at 3:58.
Angelica let her in.
Abby was younger than her voice. She looked at Catherine, then at me, then at the walker, which is where everybody looks.
I gave her the notebook.
She read the page. She read it again. “Can I take a picture of this?”
“Take two.”
She did. “I’ll let the office know tonight. I’m sorry about the trouble, Mrs. Vanderlinden.” She didn’t look at Catherine on the way out.
When the front door shut, Catherine laughed once, through her nose.
“Your husband came to us first,” she said. “Did your card tell you that? Stood next to our car in his work boots with his hat in his hand. And I said no, because we were stretched, and we were. And then every Thanksgiving for forty-seven years he passed me the sweet potatoes in this kitchen like he’d forgiven me. I never asked him to forgive me. I’d have liked him better if he’d just stayed mad.”
Nobody said anything.
“I want my key,” I said.
“The rent’s gone, by the way. It went on your taxes. I have the receipt.”
“Then I owe them fourteen hundred dollars,” I said. “Key.”
She worked it off her ring. Her nails are long, and it took her a while. She set it down on top of the index card, right on the coffee ring.
She went out my back door the way she’d come in, and left it standing open behind her.
Tuesday, 9:41
It’s June now. I’m on a cane.
The fourth bedroom is still empty. The den isn’t. Ernie watches the Reds in the recliner because I told him to, and the dent fits him fine.
Catherine’s key hangs on a nail by the back door. She hasn’t called for it. She didn’t call on my birthday either.
There’s an envelope with fourteen hundred dollars in it that Ernie won’t take and I won’t take back. It lives in the Folgers can with the last of the screws.
The step hasn’t moved.
At 9:41 on a Tuesday night my phone buzzed on the kitchen table, and there was Angelica on the screen, coming up my front steps after a late shift with a laundry basket of groceries on her hip, because she says a basket carries more than bags.
Behind her, Ernie took the steps one at a time, with a hand on my railing.
I set the phone down and got up.
I had the door open before she got her key out.
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to somebody who’s ever kept a room made up for whoever might knock.
For more family betrayals that turn a homecoming into a fight, read “She Held Out A Pen. I Raised My Daughter In That House.” and “The Gate Supervisor Asked Me If I Knew The Woman In 2B.”. And when the fallout comes with a shocking bill, there’s “His Bride Turned Me Away, Then Ali Said I Owed $61,000.”
