My son-in-law set my two suitcases on the porch and said, “You’ve got a pension and a government check every month, Cheryl. People live on a lot less.” My daughter kept rinsing the same plate. Nobody in that kitchen knew I’d spent the morning signing my late husband’s feed store lot over to a buyer for $5,480,000.
I’d been in their spare room five weeks.
New knee, right side.
The plan had been two weeks.
Then the physical therapist in Grand Island said four, and the stairs at my own place said longer than that.
So I paid for things.
The propane delivery in October, $640.
Groceries every Thursday, because Amanda said Tobias’s jobs had gone slow.
The first payment on Isla’s braces, which nobody asked me to cover and nobody thanked me for.
Tobias didn’t like my reading glasses left on the kitchen table.
He didn’t like the television in the spare room after ten.
He told his brother on the phone, with the bedroom door wide open, that the whole house smelled like a nursing home now.
I let it go.
Morris used to say I could let go of a thing faster than anybody he’d ever met, and he meant it kindly, mostly.
That Tuesday I drove myself to town for the first time since the surgery.
I sat at a conference table in Lyndon Vogler’s office and signed eleven pages next to a glass bowl of butterscotch candies.
I didn’t tell a soul where I was going.
Morris and I ran that feed store for thirty-one years.
When it closed, the building sat empty on the highway with the lot under it, and every spring some company mailed a letter.
This spring one of the letters had a number in it I couldn’t wave off.
I got back a little after four.
My suitcases were already on the porch.
Both of them.
Zipped.
Tobias stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his muddy work boots still on Amanda’s runner.
“Amanda and I talked,” he said.
I looked past him into the kitchen.
Amanda was at the sink with her back to me.
“Did you,” I said.
“You’re walking fine now. You’ve got Morris’s money coming in every month. There’s a place on Second Street that rents rooms by the week.”
“By the week,” I said.
“It’s not personal. We need the room back.”
The room was where they kept a treadmill nobody had stepped on since Easter.
“Amanda,” I said.
She turned the water off.
She dried her hands on a dish towel for a long time.
“Mom, please don’t make this into a whole thing. I’m not fighting him over this. Not tonight.”
Isla was on the stairs behind her, nine years old, holding the rail with both hands.
She didn’t say a word.
She just watched me.
That was the part that got me.
I kept the morning to myself.
I picked up the smaller suitcase, and Tobias let me pick up the bigger one too.
He had the door shut before I reached the truck.
Through the front window I saw him lean down and say something to Amanda, and she laughed, short, the way she used to laugh at her father’s jokes when she didn’t get them.
I sat in Morris’s old pickup in their driveway with the heater on high.
My phone buzzed against the cup holder.
Lyndon.
“Wire’s done, Cheryl. Every dollar of it, less what we talked about. Congratulations.”
I read it twice.
Then I thought about the other paper.
Four years back, when Tobias opened his heating and cooling outfit, the bank wouldn’t lend to him alone.
So I signed next to him.
A $212,000 equipment loan, with MY house standing behind it.
He’d missed the last three payments.
The bank called me about it, not him.
I covered them and never said a word.
I called Lyndon back.
“I want the whole file on that equipment loan,” I said. “Every page I ever co-signed for Tobias Sorensen.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
He went quiet on the line.
“Cheryl, there’s something you need to hear first. I was going to call you in the morning.”
“Go on.”
“A man phoned the office last Friday asking whether the lot had closed yet. Said he was your son-in-law. Said he held your power of attorney and the bank needed a date.”
I looked up at the house.
The porch light was off.
“I NEVER SIGNED A POWER OF ATTORNEY FOR ANYBODY,” I said.
“I figured,” Lyndon said. “Because he faxed us one on Monday. Your name’s on the bottom line, and it’s dated the morning they wheeled you into surgery.”
Account ending 0917
“What did he want it for,” I said.
“There’s a letter with it. On his company paper.” I could hear pages turning on Lyndon’s end. “It says that as your attorney-in-fact he’s instructing me to wire the net proceeds of the sale to a business checking account ending in 0917. Sorensen Heating and Cooling.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“And where is it?”
“In your account, Cheryl. The one you gave me at my table this morning, with your own hand. I don’t move five million dollars on a fax.”
I found a pharmacy receipt in the cup holder and a pen that worked on the second try.
I wrote 0917 on the back of the receipt.
I don’t know why. I just wanted it written down somewhere that was mine.
In the front window Amanda was wiping the counter now. Tobias was gone from the glass.
“He called again this morning,” Lyndon said. “Dana told him I was in a closing. She didn’t say whose.”
“Did he ask?”
“He asked if the money would go out today. She said she couldn’t discuss a client’s business. He said, ‘I’m the client’s business,’ and hung up on her.”
I turned the heater down.
The pickup’s fan had a rattle Morris always meant to fix, and with it on high I couldn’t hear myself think.
“Cheryl,” Lyndon said. “Can I ask you something before you hang up? The closing packet I mailed out two weeks ago. Did you open that envelope yourself?”
The green ledger
The mail.
When I went in for the knee, I filled out one of those yellow forwarding cards at the post office, because I couldn’t see myself walking down my own driveway to the box for a month.
Everything came to Amanda’s house after that.
The packet from Lyndon’s office came on a Wednesday. Amanda set it next to my plate at supper.
It had been slit along the top.
“It came that way,” she said. “The machines tear them sometimes.”
Tobias didn’t look up from his phone.
I believed her. I still don’t know if I should have.
Morris would have known.
He was the one at the store who kept the green ledger under the register, the credit book, every farmer within thirty miles who ran a tab on feed and fencing through a bad year.
People think a feed store sells feed. Mostly it carries people until harvest.
In 1998 a man named Pablo, who raised cattle out past the river, got behind with the bank, and the bank was going to take his herd.
Morris drove to town in his work coat, sat down across from the loan officer and bought Pablo’s note.
Paid the bank what Pablo owed and walked out holding the paper.
“Now he owes us,” Morris said at supper. “And we’re patient people.”
Pablo paid it off in four years. He sent a ham every Christmas until he died.
I thought about that ledger more than once those five weeks, every time I paid for propane in a house where nobody said thank you.
The other thing was the morning of the surgery itself.
They had me in a curtained bay with a needle in the back of my hand. A woman from the hospital came by with a clipboard and asked if I had a health care directive. I didn’t.
So Amanda, who works the counter at the credit union and carries her notary stamp in a zippered bag in her purse, said she could do it right there.
Four pages. Who decides for me if I can’t.
I signed the last page with the clipboard on my blanket. The nurse bumped the bed rail just as I got to the end of my name, and the tail of the “t” ran off the line and halfway into the margin.
Amanda laughed and said, “That’ll hold up anywhere,” and pressed her seal next to it.
Tobias was in the chair by the curtain. He held the folder while she put the stamp away.
The original went home with them, in that folder, for safekeeping.
And week two, Tobias asked for my house key, to go run the taps so the pipes wouldn’t sit. He never gave it back. I never asked.
“I didn’t open it,” I told Lyndon. “It was open when I got it.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he said to come in at eight.
I put Morris’s truck in reverse and drove to my own house.
Locust Street
There were lights on in my living room.
A pickup I didn’t know sat in my driveway, nose-in, with a ladder rack and a sticker for a Kearney gun show in the back window.
My knee did not want the porch stairs. I took them one at a time with my hand on the rail, the way the therapist taught me.
My key ring had a spare. I didn’t need it. The door opened before I got to it.
Gavin Sorensen. Tobias’s younger brother. I’d met him three times, all at Thanksgiving.
He was in his socks.
Behind him my recliner had been turned to face a television that wasn’t mine.
“Cheryl,” he said. “Hey. Tobias said you were in Kearney.”
“Kearney,” I said.
“The place over there. Assisted. He said you’d signed the house over to him to manage while you got settled. Said you weren’t coming back to it.”
There were work boots by my door. A bag of dog food on the floor where Morris’s boots used to be, and I don’t have a dog.
“How long have you been here, Gavin?”
“First of October. I pay Tobias seven-fifty the first of every month. Cash.” He scratched the back of his neck. “That’s what he told me to do.”
“It’s my house.”
“I know that. I’m not saying it’s not.” He went back inside and came out with a sheet of paper folded in thirds, and he didn’t hand it to me. He held it up so I could read it in the porch light.
A lease. One page, off the internet. My address at the top.
Landlord: Cheryl Urquhart.
Signed: Tobias Sorensen, attorney-in-fact for Cheryl Urquhart.
“I’ve got nowhere else right now,” Gavin said. “Me and Karolina split in August. I’m not trying to be a jerk about this.”
“Then don’t be.”
He folded the paper back up and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Lease says through April,” Gavin said. “Tobias signed it for you.”
Room 6, Second Street
So I took the room.
Tobias had been right about one thing. There was a place on Second Street that rented by the week. A hundred and eighty-five dollars, cash, paid to a woman named Sonia who wrote me a receipt in a spiral book and told me the hot water came on slow.
Room 6 had a bed, a chair and a radiator that knocked.
I sat on the bed in my coat and called my daughter.
Tobias answered her phone.
“She’s in the bath,” he said. “You get settled?”
“I went by my house.”
He didn’t say anything for a second. I could hear the television, and Isla asking somebody where the scissors were.
“Somebody had to look after that place,” Tobias said. “Pipes freeze, roof leaks, kids break in. Gavin keeps an eye on it. You’re welcome.”
“He’s paying you rent.”
“He’s covering the utilities. You want to talk numbers, let’s talk numbers. You know who’s been carrying your stuff for five weeks? Driving you to therapy? Hauling your laundry?”
Amanda drove me to therapy. I did my own laundry on a bad knee because nobody offered.
I didn’t say that.
“I talked to Nolan at the bank Friday,” he said. “About the equipment loan. He’s expecting a payoff by end of the week. I told him you’d want to clear it out. Clean slate, with the lot money. Morris would want that, you know he would.”
“You told him that.”
“Somebody had to. You’re sixty-seven years old, Cheryl, and you just had surgery. You shouldn’t be handling this kind of money by yourself. That’s all anybody’s trying to do here, is help.”
“Put Amanda on.”
“She’s in the bath,” he said, and hung up.
I sat there a long time with the radiator knocking.
Then I unzipped the bigger suitcase, because I needed my pills and my nightgown.
Amanda folds things in thirds, the way the store’s feed sacks used to stack. These were balled up and pushed in. Tobias had packed this one.
My pills were there. My nightgown. My Bible.
I went through it twice, and the inside pocket, and the smaller suitcase too.
The blue hospital folder with my health care directive was gone.
Page four of four
Lyndon’s office opens at eight. I was in the lot at seven-thirty with the engine running.
Dana brought me coffee in a paper cup and didn’t ask why I looked the way I looked.
The bowl of butterscotch candies was still on the conference table. Somebody had refilled it since yesterday.
Lyndon set the fax down in front of me, all of it, the cover letter on top.
The first two pages were the power of attorney itself. Durable. General. Everything. My bank accounts, my real estate, any sale proceeds, the right to sign leases, the right to deal with lenders on my behalf. It used words like “hereby” more than anybody I’ve ever known.
Page one of three, it said at the bottom. Page two of three.
Then the signature page.
My name, in my hand.
The “t” in Urquhart ran off the line and halfway into the margin.
Next to it was Amanda’s notary seal, her commission number, the date. The morning of the surgery.
Down in the corner, in small hospital type that the fax had almost lost, it said: Page 4 of 4.
I put my finger on it.
Lyndon leaned over.
“That’s the last page of my health care directive,” I said. “I signed it in pre-op with a nurse bumping my bed. Amanda stamped it right there.”
Lyndon read the corner. He read it again. He sat back in his chair and took his glasses off.
“So it’s your real signature,” he said.
“On the wrong paper.”
“And your daughter’s real seal.” He rubbed his eyes. “Cheryl, on its face, this says Amanda watched you sign a power of attorney. If this gets handed to the county attorney, she’s the first person they’re going to talk to. Not him. Her.”
“He took the folder out of my room,” I said.
“Can you prove that?”
I couldn’t. It had been in the spare room for five weeks in a house with three other people in it.
Lyndon pulled a legal pad over and wrote for a minute.
“Here’s what I can do today,” he said. “I can send a revocation of any power of attorney in your name to every bank in the county and the register of deeds. That stops him. Gavin’s lease is worth nothing, since it was signed on a document you never gave. I can have a letter on Gavin’s door by noon.”
“And the bank. The loan.”
“Nolan’s going to want that loan current. You’re on it. Your house is on it.”
I looked at the butterscotch bowl.
Morris in his work coat, sitting across from a loan officer.
“Call Nolan,” I said. “I don’t want to pay that loan off for Tobias. I want to buy his note.”
Lyndon looked at me a while.
Then he picked up the phone.
It took until two in the afternoon. A hundred and fifty-eight thousand, four hundred dollars of the lot money, wired from my account to the bank. Nolan sent over a two-page assignment. The note, the security agreement, and every van, compressor and tool on the equipment list were mine to collect on.
Lyndon held the fax out to me before I left. “Do you want this going to the county attorney?” he said. “You understand what it does to Amanda if it does?”
Wednesday, four-fifteen
Tobias was home early. His boots were on the runner again.
Isla was at the kitchen table with a math worksheet. Amanda was at the stove.
I didn’t knock. I still had their garage code, and they’d never changed it.
Tobias stood up so fast his chair scraped.
“No,” he said. “No, no. You don’t get to just walk in here after the stunt you pulled. Gavin called me at lunch. There’s a letter on his door from your lawyer. You know what you did to my brother? He’s got nowhere to go.”
I set two papers on the table, side by side. The fax with page four of four on top. Nolan’s assignment next to it.
Amanda turned the burner off.
“Isla, go upstairs, honey,” she said.
Isla went as far as the third step and sat down.
Tobias picked up the assignment. He read the top of it. He read it again, and his mouth moved on the words.
“What is this?”
“Your loan,” I said.
“I know what my loan is.”
“It’s mine now.”
“You can’t do that. That’s my business. That’s my trucks. You went behind my back to my bank? You went to Nolan? I’ve known Nolan since high school.” He threw the paper down on the table. “You want to talk about behind my back? Morris’s lot sits there eleven years and you sell it without saying one word to your own family? Your own daughter? We could’ve used that money. We could’ve been out from under this whole thing. You knew we were behind. You knew it. And you sat at that table every night eating our food and you didn’t say a word.”
“I paid for the food,” I said.
“Oh, here we go.”
Amanda was looking at the fax. She’d picked it up by the corner. She was looking at the seal.
“Tobias,” she said. “This is my stamp.”
“It’s fine.”
“This is Mom’s directive. This is the page from the hospital.”
“Amanda. It’s fine. It’s a form. Everybody does it this way.”
“You told me she asked you to handle the sale. You said she asked you in pre-op. While I was getting coffee.”
Tobias put both hands flat on the table and leaned on them.
“You want to call the sheriff, Cheryl? Go ahead. Call him. That’s not my stamp. That’s not my name down there. That’s hers.” He pointed at Amanda without looking at her. “Who do you think they’re going to put in the chair? The guy who faxed a paper, or the notary who swore she watched you sign it? Go on. You want Isla’s mom in handcuffs at the credit union in front of everybody? Over money? Over a lot that’s been sitting empty eleven years?”
Amanda put the fax down.
Nobody said anything.
On the stairs Isla had both hands on the rail again.
“Lyndon has the original in his safe,” I said. “It stays there.”
Tobias straightened up. Something in his shoulders let go, and he almost smiled.
“Payment’s due the first of every month,” I said. “Nineteen hundred. To me. Gavin’s out of my house by Saturday, or I come for the vans.”
“You’d take my trucks.”
“I’d take my trucks.”
He opened his mouth and didn’t find anything.
Amanda went back to the stove and turned the burner on under the pan. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at him either.
“Mom,” she said, to the pan. “I think you should go.”
My reading glasses were still on the kitchen table, where he’d never liked them.
I picked them up and put them in my coat pocket, and I let myself out.
The first of December
My own porch has nine stairs. By December I could take them without the rail, mostly.
Gavin was gone by that Saturday. He left the key in the mailbox and a bag of dog food in my garage. I still don’t know whose dog.
On the first of December, a little after four, Amanda’s car pulled into my driveway and stayed running.
She didn’t get out.
Isla got out of the back with a pink suitcase on wheels and a plastic grocery bag of library books, and Amanda rolled her window down far enough to hand me a bank envelope.
“He said to tell you it’s all there,” she said.
Nineteen hundred dollars, in twenties. I didn’t count it in front of her.
“You want to come in? I’ve got coffee on.”
“Sunday at five,” Amanda said. “I’ll pick her up at five.”
She rolled the window up.
Isla stood at the bottom of my stairs with her suitcase and her bag of books, looking up at the door.
I came down and reached for the suitcase.
She shook her head and held the handle with both hands.
“I’ve got it, Grandma,” she said. “You take the books.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who has ever signed their name next to someone else’s.
Family betrayal and money have a way of surfacing at the worst moments – read about a son who put a $46,500 supper club bill on his mother’s account in “My Son Put $46,500 on the Supper Club That Pays Me $4,100 a Month” and an ex’s mother who showed up with a power of attorney in “My Ex’s Mother Held Up a Power of Attorney on My Front Steps at Dawn”. For another bitter family fight over property, there’s “My Dad Swore Mom Signed Him the House the Day Before She Died”.
