My husband spent the last year of his life telling me, “Stop asking where I go on Thursdays, Lulu, you sound like your mother.” Eleven years after we buried him, a doctor turned her screen around and asked me about the pregnancy I’d had at sixty-six. My son read the name on that file and put his coffee on the floor.
It started in March, with my good slacks.
The button wouldn’t reach.
By May the elastic ones wouldn’t either, and I was living in two housedresses from the drugstore and one of Neal’s old flannel shirts.
I blamed pie. I’d been making a lot of pie.
My daughter-in-law didn’t buy it.
“Louise, I’m not trying to be rude,” Thanh said at Sunday dinner. “But you look like you swallowed a basketball.”
“I’m seventy-eight. Things shift.”
“Not that fast they don’t.”
She said it to Guy, not to me. He looked at my middle and then down at his plate and kept cutting the same piece of ham.
A month later I woke at four in the morning with a pressure under my ribs like somebody had parked a car on me.
I couldn’t breathe lying flat.
I sat up in Neal’s recliner until the window went gray, and then I called my son.
He was in my driveway in twenty minutes with his work boots on and the laces dragging.
The hospital in Kearney put me in a gown and a room with a TV bolted to the wall. A man on it was sanding a canoe. Nobody turned it off.
The ultrasound girl kept moving the wand around and not saying anything.
That’s how you know.
Dr. Hobson came in after lunch with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair.
“It’s a cyst on your left ovary,” she said. “A big one. Close to nine inches. It’s been crowding everything else in there.”
“Is it cancer?”
“We’ll know after surgery. I’d like to do it Thursday.”
Thursday. Of all the days.
“Before that, I have to ask you about something odd.”
She turned the monitor on its arm so it faced me.
“The state’s records system pulls everything billed under your name and birthday, from every clinic. There’s an obstetric ultrasound on here from August 2014. A women’s clinic two counties over.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“I was SIXTY-SIX.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I’ve never set foot in that town.”
“Then somebody used your insurance card,” she said. “It happens more than people think. Usually it’s someone in the family.”
She scrolled down.
The signature on the form was my name in a hand that wasn’t mine. The box for the father said Neal Cortez. Our address. Our old landline, the one we dropped in 2016.
And under emergency contact, a woman I had never heard of.
Monica Foley.
Guy put his coffee down. Not on the counter. On the floor.
“Mom,” he said. “Can we do this in the hall.”
“Do it here.”
He looked at the doctor. She said she’d give us a minute and pulled the door almost shut behind her.
My son is fifty-two. He has a mortgage and a bad knee and a daughter learning to drive. He sat down on that little rolling stool like he’d been sent to the principal.
“I know her,” he said.
“How do you know her.”
“Dad’s Thursdays.”
That was all for a while.
Neal went somewhere every Thursday for the last three years of his life. The bait shop, he said. The lodge. Dean Zahn’s garage, helping with a transmission. When I asked too many times he said the thing about my mother, and I quit asking, because I was sixty-six and I did not want to be her.
“He took me with him once,” Guy said. “Spring of 2015. A few weeks before. He said if anything happened to him I should make sure she was all right.”
“All RIGHT?”
“He said she was a lodge friend who’d hit hard times.”
“And you believed that.”
“I was forty-one, Mom. I wanted to.”
I didn’t say anything.
My hands were on my stomach. On the thing they were going to take out of me on a Thursday.
“What did you do,” I said.
He rubbed his knee.
“I’ve been sending her money.”
“How much money?”
“Four hundred a month.”
I did the math the way I do a grocery bill, in my head, fast, before the cashier can tell me.
“For ELEVEN YEARS?”
“Dad left me the boat money. I figured it was his to give.”
“That was OUR boat, Guy. I picked the color.”
He didn’t look up.
“There’s a little boy,” I said. “Isn’t there.”
He took his phone out of his jacket and held it face down on his knee like it was hot.
“His name’s Cooper. He’s eleven. I NEVER told Thanh either.”
The man on the TV was still sanding.
“Give me the phone.”
“Mom, wait. That’s not the part I’m scared of.”
“What on God’s earth is the part you’re scared of?”
He finally looked at me.
“She knows you’re here. I texted her from the parking lot this morning.”
“WHY WOULD YOU TEXT HER?”
“Because she made me promise. Eleven years ago. If you ever ended up in a hospital, I had to call her before anybody cut you open.”
The door moved an inch. Dr. Hobson’s shoes in the gap.
“She said there’s something in Dad’s file,” Guy said, “and it isn’t about her. It’s about you.”
The phone on his knee
He didn’t hand it over. I took it off his knee the way I used to take the car keys off him when he was seventeen.
The last message was hers, from 7:52 that morning.
Ask your mother if she remembers signing a deed in August 2014. Neal kept a copy at my place with the rest of his file. It says who gets her house when she’s gone. Call me before Thursday.
Under it a little gray bubble said she was typing.
“A deed,” I said. “To my house.”
“I didn’t know about that part, Mom. She never said one word about a deed till this morning.”
Dr. Hobson’s shoes were still in the gap. I told her five more minutes. She said she’d go see another patient, and the shoes went away.
Neal and I bought that house on 31st Street in 1979 for forty-one thousand dollars. The only things I ever signed for it were the mortgage and the payoff letter, both at the bank on Central, both with a man in a tie watching me do it.
The gray bubble stopped. Nothing came.
“What else did she send you,” I said. “Scroll up.”
He didn’t move.
“Guy. What else is in this phone?”
The gray box
When Neal died in May of 2015 I did what my mother did when my father died. I got one box and put that whole month in it.
It was his gray metal box from the elevator, with a handle on top and a lock nobody had the key to. The death certificate went in. The funeral bill. The deed to the house, which had been in there since 1979 anyway. And the cards.
Ninety-one sympathy cards. I counted them once at the kitchen table with a cup of Sanka going cold.
One of them had no name on it. Thinking of you, Mrs. Cortez. He talked about you all the time. A friend from the lodge. The envelope said Mrs. Louise Cortez, and the L in Louise was a big loop, like a lasso somebody threw.
I remember that L because nobody writes mine that way. Sister Agnes made us do capital L’s as one straight stick with a little foot, and I have signed every check of my life like that.
There was a woman at the back of the funeral home that night, too. A green coat, a baby carrier hooked on her arm. She stood through the rosary and left before the line. I thought she was somebody’s granddaughter from out of town.
And there was the insurance card. The summer before he died, Neal asked for my Medicare supplement card. He said the pharmacy wanted it on file for my blood pressure pills. It came back a week later in a different plastic sleeve, a blue one, and I remember being annoyed, because the old one had been clear.
I put the box on the closet shelf in June of 2015 and I never opened it again. You don’t. You think you will.
That was the box I was thinking about with Guy’s phone in my hand, sitting on the edge of that exam table in a paper gown.
He reached over and scrolled for me. His thumb was shaking.
Every month since July of 2015, on the first or the second, there was a message from Monica Foley with the same two words in it.
Got it.
Buffalo County, August 2014
Before I could call her, a woman named Stella came in with a clipboard.
She was the patient advocate. She had a lanyard full of keys and a zippered pouch on her belt, and she wanted to know if I had an advance directive on file before Thursday.
“I’m here till four-thirty every day,” she said. “Wills, powers of attorney, deeds, whatever folks need before they go under. I’ve got my stamp right here. You’d be surprised what people remember they never fixed.”
I told her to come back tomorrow. She said she would.
Then the phone buzzed in my lap, and Monica Foley had sent a picture.
It was the first page of a deed. Transfer on Death Deed, across the top in capitals. Our address on 31st Street. A stamp from the Buffalo County register of deeds, August 19, 2014, which is a building eight blocks from the hospital I was lying in.
Grantors, Neal A. Cortez and Louise Cortez.
Beneficiary, Monica A. Foley.
I called her. Guy put his hands over his face.
She answered on the first ring, like she’d been holding it.
“Mrs. Cortez,” she said. “I’m so sorry you’re sick.”
Her voice was soft. A voice for a dentist’s office.
“What is this,” I said.
“It’s what Neal wanted. He wanted Cooper to have a roof someday. Someday, Mrs. Cortez. You’ve got a lot of years. Nobody’s taking anything from you.”
“I never signed this.”
“Neal took care of the paperwork. I didn’t ask how. You know how he was.”
I did know how he was. That was the trouble.
“So why tell me now?”
“Because that hospital has my 2014 visit in your chart,” she said, “and they’ll send it to the fraud people at the insurance company. I can’t have that. I have a boy. So you tell your doctor it was a billing mix-up. Guy keeps doing what his dad asked. And nobody ever has to talk about the house.”
“And if I tell them the truth?”
“Then I’ll need a lawyer. And lawyers read deeds out loud.”
Guy said, “Mom, maybe just…” and didn’t finish.
“It’s my house,” I said.
“Till Thursday it is,” Monica said.
Antonio’s office on Central
I tried to leave.
I got as far as standing up with my gown open in the back and my good slacks in my hand, which was stupid, because they hadn’t buttoned since March. The pressure came up under my ribs and I sat back down hard on the paper.
Dr. Hobson came in at the noise. She said if that cyst twisted on the stalk I’d be in surgery tonight instead of Thursday, and not the nice kind, and was I planning to walk to the courthouse holding my stomach.
I said I’d considered it.
She said, “Lie down, Mrs. Cortez.”
So I called Antonio’s office instead. Antonio did Neal’s will in 2009, the plain one that left everything to me and then to Guy. The girl who answered was named Hailey and she was very kind.
Antonio was in a trial in Grand Island. He’d be back Monday.
Monday is after Thursday.
I said so. Hailey said she was sorry and could she take a message, and I said tell him Louise Cortez might be dead by Monday and hung up on her, which I am not proud of.
Guy sat on his stool through all of it.
“Mom, you’ll be fine Thursday,” he said. “We fix it after.”
“And if I’m not fine Thursday?”
He didn’t answer that.
“Whose house is it then, Guy?”
“I’d never let her have it.”
“You’d never let her have four hundred dollars a month either.”
He got up and stood at the window with his back to me. His boots were still untied. They’d been untied since four in the morning.
“Call Thanh,” I said. “Tell her to bring my overnight bag. And the gray box on the shelf in my closet. The heavy one.”
“Thanh doesn’t know any of this.”
“Then she’s going to.”
He called. I heard him say “Mom wants her box” and “I’ll explain when you get here” and then nothing else for a while, because Thanh was the one talking.
She came at seven-fifteen, after visiting hours were supposed to be over.
She stood in the doorway with my bag over her shoulder and Neal’s gray box in both arms.
“Guy,” she said. “Why is your mother asking for the house papers?”
Sister Agnes’s L
Thanh didn’t go home that night. She slept in the vinyl chair by the window with her coat over her. Guy went home alone. I don’t know what was said in the hall. I heard her voice, and then I heard the elevator.
At six the next morning I asked her to put the box on my tray table.
There was no key. Neal never had one. I worked the latch with a butter knife from my breakfast tray, which took three tries, and Thanh watched me do it and didn’t offer to help.
The deed from 1979 was on top. Then the death certificate. Then the cards in two rubber bands, one of them gone brittle and snapped.
I knew where the lodge card was. Fourth or fifth from the bottom. I’d held it longer than the others in 2015.
Thinking of you, Mrs. Cortez. He talked about you all the time.
I laid the envelope on the tray. Mrs. Louise Cortez, with that lasso of an L.
Then I held Guy’s phone next to it. He’d left it with me. The picture of the deed, the bottom of the page, the two signatures.
Neal’s was Neal’s. A scrawl like a fence going down a hill. I’d have known it anywhere.
The one under it said Louise Cortez with a big loop at the front.
Thanh got up out of the chair and came and stood next to me.
When Dr. Hobson came on rounds at seven-thirty I asked her to turn the screen around again. She looked at the two of us and the butter knife and the box and didn’t ask. She scrolled to the clinic form from August 2014.
My name, in a hand that wasn’t mine. The same loop.
Then Stella came in with her clipboard, because she’d said she would.
“Advance directive,” she said. “Sign here and here, honey, and I’ll stamp it.”
I signed it. One straight stick with a little foot, the way Sister Agnes taught me in 1955.
Stella looked at my L. Then at the envelope on the tray. Then at the phone. Thanh put her finger on each of the three loops, one after the other, without saying a word.
“Stella,” I said. “Can a person take back a deed like that?”
“A transfer-on-death? If the house is yours, sure. You record a revocation, and it’s done. I’ve got the form in my car. I do two a month.”
“Is the house mine, Thanh?”
“Neal’s gone,” Thanh said. “It’s yours.”
Stella went to get the form.
The card was still lying on the tray. On the back flap of the envelope, in the same round hand, Monica had written a return address once and then scratched it out.
Room 214
I signed the revocation at ten-forty. Stella stamped it on my tray table next to the oatmeal.
Thanh drove it to the courthouse herself. She called me from the register of deeds at one-fifteen and said it was recorded and she had a copy with the stamp on it, and she was going to sit in her car for a minute before she came back.
Then I had Guy send Monica one text. Mom wants to talk. Room 214.
She was there by three. Two counties over is fifty minutes if you don’t stop.
She was younger than I’d made her in my head. Fifty or so. Hair pulled back tight, a nice purse, the green going out of fashion on her blouse. She shut the door behind her, which nobody had done for me all week.
“Mrs. Cortez. I’m glad you called.”
Guy stood up off his stool. She didn’t look at him.
“I came to Neal’s funeral,” she said. “Did you know that? I stood in the back with Cooper in his carrier. He was five weeks old. I didn’t go through the line because I didn’t think that was fair to you. I’ve always tried to be fair to you.”
The green coat. The baby carrier.
“He gave me your card,” she said. “Your insurance card. I didn’t have any insurance and I was forty and scared, and he said you’d never check, you never checked anything. He was right, wasn’t he? Eleven years.”
She sat down in Thanh’s chair without being asked.
“So here’s what I need. You tell Dr. Hobson it was a clerk’s error. Guy keeps on like before. And the house is for Cooper when you’re gone, the way Neal wanted. You won’t even know. You’ll be dead.”
“You asked my son to call you before they cut me open,” I said.
“I needed to know.” She said it like it was reasonable. “If you didn’t wake up on that table, I wasn’t going to sit two counties over while Thanh’s people got a lawyer in front of that deed. I’d have been at the courthouse the next morning. Neal would want me there.”
The door opened. Thanh came in with a manila envelope and her car keys still in her hand.
She took out the copy with the county stamp and laid it on the blanket where Monica could read it upside down.
Monica read it. It took her a while.
“You can’t do that,” she said. “Neal signed that.”
“So did you,” I said.
I put the lodge card on top of the revocation.
She looked at her own L for a long time.
“That’s a sympathy card,” she said. “I sent you a sympathy card. That’s what decent people do.”
“Dr. Hobson,” I said, because she was in the doorway now. “That ultrasound from 2014. It belongs to Ms. Foley. She’s right here if you need her birthday.”
Dr. Hobson looked at Monica and wrote something on her pad.
Monica stood up. Her purse strap was caught on the chair arm and she yanked it free.
“Four hundred dollars,” she said to Guy. “Eleven years. And you’re just going to stop.”
“It’s stopped,” Guy said.
“He’s your husband’s son,” she said to me. “He’s your son’s brother. He’s eleven years old and he has your husband’s ears, and you’re taking his house.”
“Then Neal should have bought him one,” I said.
Thursday, September
The cyst came out on the Thursday. It weighed about as much as a sack of flour, and the lab called it benign, which Dr. Hobson said was the best word she knew.
Thanh didn’t come to Sunday dinner for three weeks. On the fourth she came, and she brought the ham, and she let Guy cut it.
The boat money is gone. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred dollars. I did that one on paper too, to be sure.
The gray box is back on the closet shelf with a new paper in it, stamped by Buffalo County. The lodge card isn’t. It went out with the coffee grounds.
On a Thursday in September I put on my good slacks, and the button reached.
Guy pulled into the driveway at noon on his lunch break. He comes Thursdays now. Nobody asked him to.
His boots were tied, double knots, both of them.
“Where do you want to go, Mom?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “Sit down. I made pie.”
If you’ve got a box like mine on a closet shelf, open it on a good day, before somebody else does it for you.
Family secrets have a way of surfacing at the worst time – read about a wedding-day slight that left a son listed as a guest, a husband’s Thursday spa shifts, and a wife who came home from water aerobics with dry hair.
