My son and his wife drove off and left me kneeling at my husband’s grave, 214 miles from my own porch, and she texted: “You’re dead weight. Find a bus.” I was 68, holding a sack of tulip bulbs. They figured I’d beg. I called somebody else, and five days later she swept into a $1,200,000 signing and saw who had the chair.
Ten seconds after her text, my son sent his own.
“Sorry Ma. She’s got a point.”
Their gray pickup was already past the stone gate, swinging out toward the highway.
I stayed down there in the wet grass with the phone in one hand and the sack in the other.
DEAD WEIGHT.
It was three years to the day since we put him in the ground.
My eyes hadn’t been any good for driving since the cataract surgery in August, so I’d asked the two of them to take me down to Coshocton, where he was born.
His wife said fine, as long as we were back by six for her sister’s thing.
All I wanted was to get the bulbs in by the stone.
He planted red tulips along our driveway every October for forty-one years, and somebody had to keep doing it.
I’d been on my knees maybe twelve minutes.
“FIVE MINUTES, Ma,” my son said through the truck window.
“I just got the trowel in.”
His wife leaned out her own window. “We’re not sitting here an hour so you can talk to dirt.”
I told her I needed twenty.
The engine started after four.
This had been coming since July.
That month his wife sat at my kitchen table with a folder from a lawyer I’d never heard of.
“It’s paperwork,” she said. “Power of attorney. In case you start forgetting things.”
“I don’t forget things.”
“Everybody says that right up until they leave the stove on.”
My son didn’t say a word. He was eating the last of my coffee cake right out of the pan.
I didn’t sign.
After that, I was confused. I was difficult. I’d “gotten strange since the funeral,” she told his cousins, and twice she called my pharmacy and asked them to phone her instead of me.
What she cared about was the buyer.
Urquhart owns the biggest tree service in three counties, and he’d offered $1,200,000 for the company my husband started in 1986 with one used mower and a trailer he welded himself.
My son has run it for eleven years. He’s good at it, I’ll give him that.
And his wife had already picked out a cabin on the lake.
She’d been passing pictures of it around after church.
The signing was Friday at ten, at Urquhart’s lawyer’s office. My son would sign. She’d sit beside him and hold his coffee.
Neither of them had ever read the will.
I never brought it up. My husband asked me not to, his last week in the hospice bed.
“Let him run it like it’s his,” he said. “See what he does when he thinks nobody’s looking.”
So I finished the bulbs.
All nine.
I patted the dirt flat with the back of the trowel and wiped my hands on my coat.
The caretaker came down the hill from the equipment shed in a golf cart that ticked like a kitchen timer. Heavy man, about sixty, Webb stitched on his jacket.
“Ma’am? You okay? I saw that truck go.”
“They had somewhere to be,” I said.
He had a little radio taped to the dashboard of the cart, playing a polka station very low.
He let me sit in the shed office by the space heater. It smelled like gasoline and wet leaves.
I didn’t answer either text.
I scrolled down to Issa.
He’d been our lawyer since the day we incorporated. At the funeral he stood at the back and left before the lunch, because he can’t stand potato salad.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Mrs. Goetz? It’s Sunday.”
“I know what day it is.”
He knew the date as well as I did.
“Where are you?”
“Coshocton. In a shed. With a very nice man named Webb.”
“Is somebody hurt?”
“No,” I said. “Send a car down here. And first thing tomorrow, call Urquhart’s lawyer, before he’s had his coffee.”
The line went so quiet I thought it dropped.
“This is about Friday.”
“It’s about Friday.”
“Do you want me to bring the stock ledger?”
“Bring all of it.”
He said a car would be there inside three hours.
It came in two hours and forty minutes. A black sedan, and a young driver who kept asking if the heat was too high.
My son called once around eight. I let it ring.
His wife texted at nine-thirty. “Hope you got back ok. Don’t make this into a whole thing.”
I put the phone face down on the nightstand and slept straight through to morning.
Monday, Issa made his call.
Tuesday, Urquhart’s lawyer called me.
Wednesday, nobody told my son a thing, because I asked them not to.
Thursday night his wife put the lake cabin up on Facebook. “Big things Friday.”
Friday I wore my navy suit, the one from the funeral, and got there forty minutes early.
The conference room had a long table and a tray of muffins nobody had touched.
Issa sat on my left with a gray accordion folder. Urquhart sat across from us, turning a pen over and over in his fingers.
“They’re parking,” his assistant said from the doorway.
I heard her before I saw her. Laughing out in the hall. Heels on tile.
She came in first, a bottle of champagne under one arm, my son behind her with his hand on the small of her back.
She was halfway into “Sorry we’re late” when she saw me.
At the head of the table. In the chair with the papers squared up in front of it.
Her smile stayed on a second too long, like it hadn’t heard yet.
My son stopped in the doorway.
“Ma? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
I didn’t say anything.
Issa opened the folder and slid the first page across the table to me.
And his wife bent down, very carefully, and set the champagne on the carpet.
The first page
The page was a photocopy of the stock ledger.
Not a printout. A copy of the actual green book my husband kept in the bottom drawer of his desk for thirty-seven years, with the ruled columns and the coffee ring on the cover that shows up gray on a copier.
The last line was in my handwriting.
One thousand shares, Goetz Lawn and Tree, transferred from the estate to the surviving spouse. The date was the March after the funeral. Issa’s initials sat beside mine.
Every share the company has ever issued was on that line.
I put my reading glasses on, read it once, and turned the page around so it faced my son.
Then I slid it down the table to him.
He didn’t sit. He leaned over the back of an empty chair and read it standing up, the way he reads an estimate before he tells a customer the number.
Urquhart’s lawyer was a woman named Kroll, with gray hair cut short and her glasses on a beaded chain. There was a little plastic strawberry on the chain, the kind of thing a grandchild picks out.
She had a copy of the same page in front of her already. Issa had sent it Monday.
“For the record,” she said, “this is the company’s share register, and the seller under it is Mrs. Goetz. That’s who we’ve been talking to since Tuesday.”
Urquhart put his pen down for the first time.
His wife was still standing just inside the door with her purse on her shoulder. She looked at the page in my son’s hands, then at me, then at the muffins, as if one of them might explain it.
“That’s not right,” she said. “That’s some old thing.”
“It’s three years old,” Issa said.
My son set the page down very flat on the table and kept his hand on it.
“Ma,” he said. “Dad left it to me.”
I didn’t answer that.
“He swore it to me. In the truck. The summer before he got sick, we were coming back from the Hendricks job and he said, it’s yours, you’re the one who’s going to run it.”
Everybody in that room turned and looked at me.
The green book
My husband bought the mower in 1986 off a man in Dresden who was moving to Arizona.
It was a used Toro with a cracked seat, and he paid a hundred and eighty dollars for it, which was most of what we had.
The trailer he made himself out of angle iron and an axle from a junkyard in Newark. He welded his initials into the tongue, an R and a G, so nobody could steal it and say it was theirs.
That trailer is still in the yard behind the shop. They use it for the stump grinder.
The green book came two years later.
Issa was twenty-nine and had a one-room office over a shoe repair, and he told my husband if he was going to have three trucks and a payroll, he’d better be a corporation. So we were. Issa drew up the papers on a Tuesday, and that night my husband sat at the kitchen table with a ruler and drew the columns in the book himself, because the one Issa gave him had the wrong number of lines.
He wrote every share in it by hand. Every one he ever gave anybody, to me, to his brother for a while in the nineties, back to himself when his brother wanted out.
Nothing ever happened to that company that isn’t in that book.
He also put the land in my name, in 1994.
The shop and the yard and the two acres behind them where the mulch piles are. There’d been a lawsuit that year, a customer’s kid who rode his bike into a trailer hitch, and Issa said keep the dirt away from the business. So the dirt was mine, and the business rented it from me for one dollar a year.
I signed that lease every January for thirty years.
When our son came on full time, he was twenty-two and could drop a forty-foot oak between a garage and a swing set without touching either. My husband was proud of him in a way he never said out loud.
What he said, in the hospice bed, was the other thing.
“I told him it’d be his,” he said. “I meant when he was ready.”
“He’s ready.”
“He’s ready to run it. I don’t know if he’s ready to own it.” He had the oxygen tube on, and he kept pulling it off his nose to talk, and I kept putting it back. “Don’t tell him. Let him run it like it’s his. See what he does when he thinks nobody’s looking.”
So the will left me the shares. And it left me the job of watching.
For three years I watched a good manager.
He made payroll every Friday. He bought two new chippers and paid them off early. He never once came to me for money.
Then he married her.
She was thirty-seven, and she sold advertising for a radio station, and on their first visit she walked through my house picking things up and putting them down in different places. She called my husband’s recliner “the brown thing.”
By last spring she was doing the company’s books on weekends.
By July she was at my kitchen table with that folder and a blue ballpoint pen. The pen had the name of a bank printed on the side, Muskingum Valley Savings. Her sister Tammy works the branch out on Route 33. She’s the notary there.
Tammy’s fiftieth birthday was the Sunday we went to Coshocton. That was the sister’s thing.
When I said no to the folder that day, his wife didn’t argue. She put the pen back in her purse and said, “Well, think about it,” and took the folder home.
I should have thought about that.
Now, across the conference room, my son was still holding his hand flat on the photocopy, and his wife finally came all the way into the room.
She put her purse on the table and opened it.
Muskingum Valley Savings
“Fine,” she said. “That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
She took out a big white envelope, folded once down the middle, and pulled three stapled pages out of it.
“It doesn’t matter whose name is in some book. We have her power of attorney.”
She set the pages on the table and pushed them toward Kroll. Not toward me.
I knew what they were. Kroll had read me the first paragraph over the phone on Tuesday, and I’d had to sit down on the step stool in my kitchen to hear the rest of it.
It was a durable power of attorney. It named my son’s wife as my agent for all my property, real and personal, with full authority to sell, lease, sign and transfer. At the bottom was a notary’s stamp from Muskingum Valley Savings, Route 33 branch, and a date in July.
And above the stamp was my signature.
Kroll already had a copy. It had come from the lawyer on the July folder in September, with a land lease for the yard. Urquhart wanted to buy the company and lease the yard, and somebody had to sign for the dirt.
His wife had known about the dirt. She’d seen my name on the lease when she did the books.
The shares, she hadn’t known about.
“She signed it,” his wife said. “In July. She just doesn’t remember, and that’s the whole problem, that’s why we did it in the first place. Ask anybody. Ask his cousins. She called the pharmacy three times in one week asking where her pills were.”
“I called them once,” I said. “To ask why they were calling you.”
“You see?” She turned to Urquhart, and her voice went soft and reasonable. “This is what it’s like. This is every day.”
Urquhart looked at her and then at me, and I could see him doing math that had nothing to do with either of us.
“I’ve got forty guys on payroll and a bank that funds this deal at noon,” he said. “I don’t care who signs. I care that it holds up.”
“It holds up,” she said. “It’s notarized.”
“I never signed that,” I said.
“Ma.” That was my son. He’d finally sat down, two chairs away from her. “You were in a bad way this summer. After the eye thing. You didn’t know what day it was half the time.”
“The eye thing was August.”
“July, August.”
His wife reached over and put her hand on his arm.
Issa didn’t say anything. He was writing on a yellow pad, slowly, in the handwriting he uses when he wants someone to wonder what he’s writing.
Kroll turned the last page of the power of attorney around and slid it to me. She held her glasses out on the chain so she could look over them.
“Mrs. Goetz,” she said. “Before anybody goes any further. Is that your signature?”
I looked at it a long time.
The big loop on the G. The little hook at the end of the z, which I’ve done since the fourth grade because a nun told me a z without a tail was lazy.
It was my signature.
July fourteenth
I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no.
I put my finger next to the date and kept it there.
July 14. And beside it, in Tammy’s printing in the notary box, 2:40 p.m., with a line that said the signer had appeared before her in person and was known to her.
Under that was a second line, for a witness.
Kroll hadn’t read me that part on Tuesday, because her copy from September had been a fax and the bottom of the page had come through black. This was the original, with the blue ink.
The witness signature on it was my son’s.
His whole name, with the middle initial he uses on contracts.
I turned the page around again and slid it back down the table, past his wife, to him.
He picked it up. He looked at his own name for a long moment.
“Yeah,” he said. “I signed that.”
His wife took her hand off his arm.
“You witnessed me signing it?” I said.
“Tammy brought it by the shop.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the page. “She said you’d signed it at the bank, she said you came in, you were fine, you just wanted it done. She needed a family member on the witness line. I signed it on the hood of the chipper.”
“Did you see me sign it?”
“Ma, it was already signed.”
“That’s how a witness works,” his wife said. “You don’t have to stand there.”
Kroll made a small noise in her throat and wrote something down.
“You said you’d sign it after the surgery,” my son said. “You said that. At the table.”
“I said no.”
“You said you’d think about it.”
“She said that.” I pointed down the table at his wife without looking at her. “I said no.”
He rubbed his face with both hands. He has his father’s hands, square, with a white scar on the left thumb from a chain saw when he was nineteen.
Urquhart picked his pen back up and started turning it again.
“Look,” his wife said. She was on her feet now, and she talked to Kroll and Urquhart like I was a lamp in the corner. “I didn’t want to say this in front of everybody. I really didn’t. But Sunday we drove her all the way down to his dad’s grave, three years, and she wandered off. She just walked away from the car. We were calling her name. We drove around that place for an hour looking for her.”
Nobody said anything.
“An hour,” she said. “And then she calls some lawyer to come get her, like we left her there.”
The shed pad
I unsnapped my handbag.
I’d brought three things, and I put them on the table one at a time, in the order I’d decided on in the car that morning.
The first was my phone.
I turned it face up and opened the messages and set it in the middle of the table, where the muffins were, so it faced Kroll. Two texts from Sunday at the top. Hers, then his, ten seconds apart.
You’re dead weight. Find a bus.
Sorry Ma. She’s got a point.
Under them, the one from nine-thirty that night. Hope you got back ok. Don’t make this into a whole thing.
Kroll read them. She didn’t touch the phone. She took her glasses off the chain and put them on properly, and read them again.
The second thing was a page from a work-order pad.
It was pink, carbon-backed, with Coshocton County Cemetery Maintenance printed across the top. Sunday in the shed, while the space heater ticked and the polka station played, I’d asked Webb if he’d write down what he’d seen and put the time on it. He’d licked the pencil first. Nobody does that anymore.
Approx 2:52 PM gray pickup left Goetz stone, did not stop at gate. Lady kneeling at stone with bag. No one came back. Sat in office w/ me til car came 5:35. R. Webb. And his phone number, underlined twice.
Kroll read that too.
The third thing was a printout from Dorsey’s Pharmacy, two blocks from my house.
I’d walked in there Tuesday afternoon after Kroll’s call, to ask why my daughter-in-law had been phoning them about me. The pharmacist had been there twenty years. She was embarrassed. She said she’d told the woman twice they couldn’t do that without my say-so, and was everything all right at home.
Then I asked her for one more thing. A record of my pickups for July.
The printout had one line highlighted in yellow, by the pharmacist, not by me.
07/14 · lisinopril 20 mg · picked up in person · signature on file · 2:31 PM.
I slid it down the table to my son, on top of his power of attorney, so the two dates were one above the other.
He read the pharmacy line, and then the notary line, and then he did what he does with a bad estimate. He counted on his fingers.
“Route 33 is forty minutes,” he said.
Nobody answered him.
“Two thirty-one at Dorsey’s, two-forty at Tammy’s bank.” He wasn’t talking to anybody. “That’s the day. That’s the coffee cake day. I drove her to Dorsey’s after. I sat in the truck.”
He looked up at me.
“I was in the truck at Dorsey’s,” he said. “You were in there with your purse. And she was at the bank?”
He turned the paper over as if there’d be something on the back.
“Then who was at the bank with Tammy?”
The champagne on the carpet
His wife talked for a long time after that.
“Oh, come ON,” she said. “A pharmacy computer? Those times are wrong all the time, they put in whatever. Ask anybody who works retail.”
Kroll didn’t say anything. She was writing.
“And that guy at the cemetery, what is he, he’s a groundskeeper, he’d write anything for her, she probably gave him twenty bucks. She gives everybody twenty bucks. She gave the paper boy forty at Christmas.”
She was walking now, the length of the table and back, and every time she passed the champagne on the carpet she stepped around it.
“You know what this is? You know what she did?” She was talking to my son now, leaning on the back of his chair. “She has been sitting on this for three years. THREE YEARS. Watching you work sixty hours a week for a company she knew wasn’t yours. Letting you think. Letting you buy the chippers. Letting you tell me it was ours. That’s sick. That’s a sick thing to do to your own kid.”
My son didn’t move.
“I did this for you,” she said. “Every bit of it. Somebody had to. You’d have run that place till you dropped dead on a stump and she’d have left it to the church.”
“Did Tammy sign Ma’s name?” he said.
“Tammy is a NOTARY. She stamps things. That’s her job.”
“Did she sign it?”
“I’m not answering that in here.” She turned to Kroll. “I’m not answering anything in here without my lawyer.”
“That’s your right,” Kroll said.
“And you.” She swung around to Urquhart. “You were going to sign. Ten minutes ago you said you didn’t care who signed.”
“I said I cared that it held up,” Urquhart said. He put his pen in his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket. “I don’t buy lawsuits. I don’t buy a company with a forged lease on the ground it’s sitting on.”
He stood and nodded at me. Then he looked at my son.
“You ever want a job, you call me. I mean that.”
He walked out. His assistant followed him with a laptop under her arm, and the door clicked shut behind them.
His wife stared at the door.
“I put twenty thousand dollars down on that cabin,” she said. “Nonrefundable. Twenty thousand. Do you understand what you just did?”
I didn’t answer her. I’d answered her in July.
Kroll capped her pen.
“Two things,” she said, “and then I’m done here. My client’s out, so the deal’s out. And I’m a lawyer with a notarization in my file that, on what I’ve just seen, a notary signed for somebody who wasn’t there. I’m obliged to report it to the Secretary of State’s office. That happens whatever anybody here decides.”
His wife sat down for the first time.
“Tammy’s going to lose her commission,” she said, to nobody.
“Probably,” Kroll said. “Maybe more than that.” She looked at Issa. “The original is the evidence. Whoever holds it.”
Issa looked at me.
And there it was, the thing I’d known on the drive over, in the back of the sedan, with the young driver asking about the heat. The original had two signatures on it besides mine and Tammy’s stamp. One was forged. The other was my son’s, with his middle initial, on a line that said he’d watched me sign.
If Issa took that page to the county prosecutor, my son went with it.
His wife saw it a second after I did. She sat up.
“He signed it,” she said. “He’s the witness. If you do anything with that, it’s him. You’d do that to him? To your own son?”
My son was looking at the green photocopy again. At his father’s columns, and my handwriting at the bottom.
I reached down the table and picked up the original power of attorney, all three pages.
I squared them up on the table, the way you square up a deck of cards. Then I put them in Issa’s gray accordion folder, in the back pocket, and closed the flap and wound the string around the button.
“It stays with Issa,” I said.
His wife let out a sound that wasn’t a word.
“That’s it? It stays with Issa? What does that mean?”
Nobody explained it to her. She worked it out herself, I think, sitting there. It meant the paper existed, with his name on it and hers, and it meant it would keep existing for as long as I wanted it to.
My son stood up.
“The company’s not for sale,” I said to him. “You run it Monday.”
He nodded. He didn’t say thank you. I wouldn’t have wanted him to.
His wife picked up her purse. She looked at him, waiting for him to pick up his keys, and he didn’t.
“Are you coming?”
“I’ll get a ride,” he said.
She stood there a second. Then she bent down and picked up the champagne off the carpet, and took it with her.
Forty-two Octobers
The last Saturday in October, I was on my knees at the end of my own driveway with a new sack of bulbs.
Red ones. Twenty-two this time, because the driveway’s longer than a headstone.
It was cold and the ground was wet, and I’d brought a folded towel to kneel on, which my husband would have laughed at.
I’d done eight when the gray pickup turned in off the road.
It came up the driveway slow, and stopped well short of me, and the engine went off.
Only one door opened.
There was a cot folded up in the truck bed, with a pillow strapped to it with a bungee cord. He’d been sleeping in the office at the shop for three weeks. The lake cabin was still up on her Facebook, the same pictures, with the caption changed to “maybe someday.”
Tammy had a letter from Columbus in a drawer, I’d heard. I didn’t ask from who.
My son walked over and stood there in his work boots, looking at the row of holes.
He’d stopped calling me Ma since that Friday. He didn’t call me anything yet. We were working on it.
Issa still had the folder. He’d mentioned it once, on the phone, and I’d told him to leave it in the back of the safe, next to the green book, and he said he would.
My son crouched down. He took the trowel out of my hand without asking, the way his father used to take the jar off me when I couldn’t get the lid.
“How deep did he put them?” he said.
“Six inches. Pointy end up.”
He dug the next hole, and held his hand out for a bulb.
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who’s ever been left at the gate and told to find a bus.
For more family secrets and inheritance disputes, read the story of a mother’s bleached uniform and a son who claimed she already knew and the son who stopped by only to ask for a signature.
