My sister’s husband reached across the table, plucked the hearing aid out of my father’s ear and dropped it in his own shirt pocket. “He can’t hear it, so he can’t argue it,” he said to the notary, and slid a deed to Dad’s $468,000 farm under the pen. My phone was already recording in my lap.
I’d paid $4,150 a month for Dad’s room at the care center for nineteen months. EVERY month, out of my own account.
My sister had visited him four times.
So when Adrienne texted that she and Ronnie would “swing by Sunday,” I went too.
The visitors’ lounge at the place outside Terre Haute smelled like canned peas.
There was a fish tank by the window with one plastic diver lying on his side in the gravel. Nobody ever stood him back up.
Dad was at the round table in his wheelchair, in the flannel shirt I’d washed on Thursday.
He lit up when he saw Adrienne. He always did.
Ronnie came in behind her with a leather folder under his arm and a young woman I’d never seen. She had a little rolling case and a stamp.
“This is Kylie,” Ronnie said. “She’s a notary. Mobile. Very convenient.”
“Convenient for what?” I said.
“Paperwork. Dad’s stuff. You know how it is.”
He’s not Ronnie’s dad. Ronnie started calling him that around the time the county reassessed the farm.
Then Dad’s hearing aid started whistling, the way it does when somebody leans too close.
Ronnie leaned in on purpose. I’m sure of that now.
“Hubert, that thing’s screaming,” he said, loud and slow. “Let me fix it.”
He pulled it out, looked at it, and put it in his pocket.
He didn’t fix anything.
Dad blinked and touched his ear.
“Ronnie, give it back,” I said.
“Relax, Shari. Ten minutes.”
Adrienne didn’t look at me. She was smoothing the tablecloth with both hands like it had wrinkles.
I took my phone out like I was checking the time. Hit the red button. Set it face down on my leg.
Kylie opened the folder. The top page said QUITCLAIM DEED in letters big enough to read upside down.
The farm.
Forty acres and the white house Dad built the porch on himself, the year I was born.
“Sign right here, Hubert,” Ronnie said. He wasn’t loud anymore. There was no point. “It’s for your Medicare.”
Dad looked at the page. Then at Ronnie’s face. Then back at the page.
“He doesn’t even know what Medicare is,” Ronnie said to Kylie. “Honestly, the man would sign a Happy Meal if you put it in front of him.”
Kylie laughed. Then she saw my face and stopped.
“Adrienne,” I said. “That’s HIS HOUSE.”
“It’s going to be ours eventually anyway,” she said. “This just skips probate.”
“I PAY for his room. You know I do.”
“Nobody asked you to,” she said. “You chose that.”
Ronnie didn’t even turn around. “When it sells, Shari, we’ll send you a real nice card.”
Dad was still holding the pen.
His hand wasn’t shaking.
Dad ran a punch press at a stamping plant for thirty-one years. You couldn’t hear a thing in there. The men talked with their mouths and read each other’s lips across the whole floor.
Ronnie didn’t know that.
Ronnie never once asked him a question about his life.
“Right on the line, Hubert,” Ronnie said. “Good man.”
Dad signed.
Slow. His whole name, the way he signs checks, the loop on the H and everything.
Adrienne put a hand on her chest and laughed once, like somebody had told a joke.
Kylie pressed her stamp down hard. Ronnie shut the folder and laid his palm flat on top of it.
“See?” he said to me. “Ten minutes. NOBODY GOT HURT.”
My phone was still going. Eleven minutes by then.
Then Dad set the pen down.
He reached into the chest pocket of his flannel, the one with the snap that sticks, and took out a piece of paper folded in quarters.
I had washed that shirt.
That paper was not in it on Thursday.
He put it on the table in front of Kylie and kept two fingers on it.
Then he looked straight at Ronnie’s mouth and said it too loud, the way he talks when he can’t hear himself.
“Now say the part about the Happy Meal again, son. SLOWER.”
Two fingers on the paper
Ronnie said, “What?”
Dad didn’t wait for him. He said the whole thing back himself, word for word, at a volume that made the lady doing a puzzle by the door look up.
“‘Honestly, the man would sign a Happy Meal if you put it in front of him.’ That’s what you told her. Before that you said I don’t know what Medicare is. I been on Medicare eighteen years, Ronnie.”
Kylie’s neck went red from the collar up.
He had all of it. Everything Ronnie said across that table after the hearing aid went in his pocket, Dad had read straight off his mouth, the way he used to read the foreman’s from forty feet away over a press running eighty strokes a minute.
Ronnie laughed. It came a second late.
“He’s repeating,” he said to Kylie. “They do that at this stage. It’s a whole thing with them.”
“Who’s them?” I said.
Nobody answered me.
Kylie put her hand out toward the folded paper. Dad didn’t lift his two fingers.
“Not yet,” he said.
Then he looked at me. His hand was shaking now that the pen was down. I don’t think he knew it was.
“Shari. You still got that thing going?”
I turned the phone over in my lap so he could see the red numbers counting. Twelve minutes and change.
He nodded once, like I’d handed him the right size wrench.
Ronnie’s eyes went from my phone to the paper and back to my phone.
“What else you got in that pocket, Hubert?”
The bean year
That farm almost went to the bank once already.
It was 1998. It rained most of June and the beans drowned in the low field, and the note on the place came due in the fall like it always did, except that year there was nothing to pay it with. I was twenty-six. I lived over a dentist’s office in town and I’d been feeding a savings account since I was sixteen. There was $11,000 in it.
I took it out in a cashier’s check and drove it out there.
Dad wouldn’t take it in the kitchen. He made me go out on the porch, the one he built, and he took it from me there. Then he wrote on the back of a feed-store receipt with a carpenter’s pencil: OWE SHARI 11,000. H. BANDA. The loop on the H.
He never paid it back. I never asked. I figured that was what it was for.
Adrienne was twenty-two that summer and living in Indianapolis. She came home at Christmas with a gray sweater for him, and he wore that sweater until the elbows went through. That’s how it was with her. She’d show up twice a year and he’d act like the sun came in with her.
Mom died in 2009.
In the spring of 2011 Dad asked me to drive him into Terre Haute, to the courthouse. “Tax business,” he said. He kept a manila folder on his knees the whole way and wouldn’t let me carry it up the steps. He was inside an hour and ten minutes. I sat in the car and ate a whole sleeve of saltines.
When he came out he said, “That’s done,” and asked did I want a tenderloin.
Nineteen months ago he fell in the barn and lay there till the mail lady heard him.
At intake the nurse in charge, a tall woman named Laverne with reading glasses on a beaded chain, asked about assets. I said there was the farm, we could look at selling some ground.
Dad said, “Don’t sell the ground.”
He said it to her, not me. So I signed the payment page with my own checking account and my own routing number. $4,150 a month. Nineteen months. $78,850. I know the total because it’s on a sticky note on my refrigerator, which I’m aware is a strange thing to keep.
The county reassessed the farm two years ago at $468,000. At Easter that year Ronnie said the number out loud twice before the ham was cut.
Back at the round table, Ronnie put his hand out flat, palm up, the way you’d ask a kid for the gum.
Dad laid his other hand on top of the two fingers.
Dewey’s ten thousand
“Okay,” Ronnie said. “Okay. Kylie, you got what you need. Write it up and let’s go.”
Kylie had a black notebook out of the rolling case. A notary journal. She’d written the date and Dad’s name and the words QUITCLAIM DEED, and she’d stopped there with her pen in the air.
“I have to put the type of ID,” she said.
“His license is in his wallet,” Ronnie said. “Adrienne, get his wallet.”
Adrienne got up and came around the table and reached into the back of Dad’s wheelchair, the pouch where I keep his wallet and his Chapstick and the spare batteries for the hearing aid that wasn’t in his ear. She knew right where it was.
I said, “Kylie. He was told that was for Medicare. You heard him say it. You laughed.”
She looked at her journal.
“Ma’am, the signer appeared in front of me and signed,” she said. “I’m not there to read it to him.”
“See?” Ronnie said. “She’s a professional. It’s done, Shari. It’s notarized. It’s a done deal.”
“Dad doesn’t want it sold,” I said. “He told the nurse. It’s in his file.”
Adrienne set the wallet on the table and didn’t sit back down.
“Shari, you’re embarrassing him.”
“I’m embarrassing him.”
“Dewey’s not going to wait forever,” she said. “He’s been renting that ground twelve years, he’s the one who’s going to farm it, it’s not like it’s going to some developer.”
Dewey Nordstrom has the place to the north. He’s rented Dad’s tillable acres for corn since before Mom died. He used to bring Dad a bag of sweet corn every August, even after Dad couldn’t shuck it.
“Dewey’s buying it,” I said.
“Dewey’s already bought it,” Ronnie said. “Pretty much. It closes Friday.”
Dad was looking at Ronnie’s mouth the whole time.
“He can’t buy it Friday,” I said. “That deed isn’t even recorded.”
Ronnie looked at Adrienne. Adrienne looked at the fish tank. Then she said it anyway, like she wanted it on the table before I found it some other way.
“Dewey gave Ronnie ten thousand down in August, Shari. Cash. It’s spent.”
The sign-in binder
I went out to the front desk to get Laverne.
Laverne wasn’t on until three. The weekend aide was at the desk, a young guy named Minh who calls my father Mr. B and lets him cheat at rummy. He had the sign-in binder open in front of him, the one everybody’s supposed to write in and nobody does.
“She’s on at three,” he said. “You want me to call her?”
“Call her.”
While he dialed I wrote myself in. My name, Dad’s name, the time. Out of habit I looked up at the lines above mine.
Me, Thursday, 5:20 to 6:45. That was the laundry day.
And above that, Wednesday.
RONNIE DECKER. Visiting: HUBERT BANDA. 10:40 to 11:55.
No Adrienne. Just Ronnie. On a Wednesday morning, an hour and fifteen minutes, in the middle of a workweek, for a man he’d seen maybe five times in nineteen months.
“He was here Wednesday?”
Minh put his hand over the phone. “Yeah. Your brother-in-law. He sat with your dad a while and then he was out in the hall on his phone a long time. Right outside the room. Walking up and down.”
“Was the door shut?”
“The door was shut. Your dad had me roll him up to the little window in it after.” Minh shrugged. “He watched him the whole time he was out there. I thought he was just, you know. Bored.”
I stood there with the pen in my hand.
“And this morning,” Minh said, “he had me go in his drawer. The one with his checkbook. There was a brown envelope in the back. He took something out of it and he had me snap his shirt pocket for him, because that snap sticks.”
“I know it sticks,” I said. “I wash it.”
“He said, ‘Don’t tell Shari, she’ll fuss.'”
Laverne picked up on Minh’s end. He told her the family in the lounge wanted her and she said she was ten minutes out.
I walked back down the hall. I could hear Ronnie before I got to the door, saying “Hubert, Hubert,” the way you’d call a dog in off the road.
When I got back to the lounge, Ronnie had Dad’s wheelchair turned around to face the fish tank.
The recorder’s stamp
“What are you doing?”
“Showing him the fish,” Ronnie said. “He likes the fish.”
He had both hands on the push handles. With Dad turned to the glass, Dad couldn’t see a single mouth in the room. That was the whole reason, and Ronnie knew I knew it.
I took the handles from him. He let go because Kylie was watching. I turned Dad back to the table and set the brake with my foot.
Dad had the folded paper against his chest now, flat, with his whole hand over it.
He looked at Kylie. Then he unfolded the paper himself, one quarter at a time, and pushed it across the tablecloth to her.
“Read it out,” he said. “You’re the notary.”
Kylie looked at Ronnie. Ronnie said nothing, so she picked it up.
“Warranty deed,” she said. She read it slowly, the way people read things that aren’t theirs. “Hubert J. Banda, grantor, of Vigo County, Indiana, conveys and warrants to Shari L. Banda, grantee, for the sum of eleven thousand dollars and other valuable consideration, the following real estate in Vigo County.” There was a legal description, section and township and range, and she skipped it with her finger. “Reserving unto the grantor a life estate in the above.”
She turned it over. There was a square stamp in the corner with a number and a date.
“Recorded April 14, 2011,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have.
The courthouse. The manila folder. The saltines.
“That’s a copy,” Ronnie said. “Anybody can make a copy.”
“It has the recorder’s instrument number on it, sir. That’s public. You can look it up on your phone in about a minute.” Kylie put the paper down. “A quitclaim gives the other person whatever the grantor has. If this is recorded, then what Mr. Banda signed for you today is his life estate.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you’d own his right to live on the farm,” she said. “Until he passes. Then it’s hers.”
Adrienne sat down.
Dad looked at me. He waited until I was looking at his face before he said anything, the way he does.
“I had the eleven,” he said. “I never forgot it.”
“You never told me. Nineteen months, Dad. I’d have stopped…” I didn’t finish. I didn’t know what I’d have stopped.
He tapped the deed once with his finger.
“You’d have argued it.”
The pocket on Ronnie’s shirt
Ronnie talked.
“This is a setup,” he said. “This is a whole setup and you know it, Shari. You coached him. You’ve been out here every week coaching a man with dementia, and you’re sitting there recording people without their permission, which is illegal, by the way, I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in Indiana…”
“It isn’t,” Kylie said, not looking up.
“… and that thing is from 2011. Where was his head at in 2011? Huh? Mom had just died. He wasn’t right. Any lawyer in Terre Haute throws that out.”
“Then he wasn’t right today either,” Kylie said. “And I just notarized it.”
Ronnie turned on her. “You’re going to want to be real careful here.”
“I’m writing it down,” she said. She was. She’d gone back to her black journal and she was writing a lot, much more than an ID type. “Signer’s hearing aid removed by the grantee before signing. Signer told document was for Medicare. That’s what happened, so that’s what I write.”
“Then I’m not paying you.”
“That’s fine.”
I stood up. I walked around the table to where Ronnie was standing and I put two fingers in his shirt pocket and took my father’s hearing aid out. He didn’t stop me. I don’t think it occurred to him that I would.
I put it in Dad’s hand. Dad put it in his ear himself, it took him three tries, and it whistled once and settled.
Then I set my phone on the table by his ear, scrolled the recording back to about minute four and turned the speaker all the way up.
There was Ronnie’s voice, slow and pleased with itself. Honestly, the man would sign a Happy Meal if you put it in front of him.
And Kylie laughing.
And then Adrienne. It’s going to be ours eventually anyway. And then mine, too loud, and hers again, flat.
Nobody asked you to. You chose that.
Dad had been fine with Ronnie’s part. Ronnie’s part he’d already had. He listened to Adrienne’s with his eyes on her face, the way he’d read her lips at the table twenty minutes before, and this time he heard the voice that went with them.
Ronnie leaned over the table at her.
“You said he was too far gone, Adrienne. You said he didn’t follow anything without the ear. You told me to take the ear out.”
Adrienne’s face went white.
“You told me you checked at the courthouse,” he said. “You said it came up clean. You said Shari’d never even think to look.”
“I looked under Dad,” she said. “I didn’t look under her.”
Laverne came in then in her coat, with her glasses on the beaded chain, and stood by the door and took in the room.
“Somebody called me.”
“I did,” I said. “I want Ronnie Decker off Dad’s visitor list.”
Laverne looked at Adrienne. “She brings him. If he’s off, she has to come on her own.”
“Then both of them,” I said.
Dad didn’t argue it.
Adrienne picked up her purse. At the door she turned around.
“You’re going to be out here every Sunday by yourself, Shari. You know that?”
The diver
Two Sundays later I brought Dad’s flannel back clean. The snap still sticks.
I paid November on the first, $4,150, out of my own account, same as always. The sticky note on my refrigerator says $83,000 now, and I keep adding to it, and I still couldn’t tell you why.
Kylie mailed me a copy of her journal page without my asking. Dewey Nordstrom called the house and told me he wants his ten thousand back from Ronnie, not from me, and he’d still like to rent the ground in the spring if that was all right. I told him it was.
A card came for Dad from Adrienne. No note. Just her name. He stood it up on the windowsill in his room and left it there.
Out in the lounge the diver was still lying on his side in the gravel.
Dad pointed at him.
“Stand him up,” he said.
I took off my watch, rolled my sleeve to the shoulder and reached in.
If this one stayed with you, call the parent who reads your face better than you think, and sit where they can see you talk.
For more family betrayals and high-stakes confrontations, read the husband who hid his wife from the chairman, the aunt whose candleholders mattered more than an ER emergency, and the sister whose future in-laws were near her father’s phone.
