The Feed Store Note They Never Read
The lawyer in Delmar
There is a town called Delmar twenty miles east of us where nobody knows the Kesslers. I found a lawyer there, a woman about my age named Paula Renner, on a Wednesday when Wade thought I was at my sister’s. I sat in her office and I laid the whole thing out, the store, the note, the phone in the truck, the money from my father’s ground.
Paula listened to all of it without changing her face, and then she asked me one question that turned the whole thing around.
“Do you want to pay off his debt,” she said, “or do you want to own it?”
I did not understand at first. She explained it to me slow, the way you explain something to a woman who spent thirty years keeping books for a farm and knows more than she thinks she does.
When you owe a bank money on a building, she said, the bank holds what is called the note, and the lien that goes with it. Most people, when they help out a family member, just hand the bank a check and the bank marks the debt paid and releases the lien, and the debt is gone. A gift. That is what Wade was expecting me to do. Pay the bank, kill the note, hand him a free and clear store.
But a note is a thing that can be bought and sold. Banks sell notes all the time, especially shaky ones they would rather not chase. If instead of paying the debt off I bought the note from First Farmers, then the debt would not disappear. It would just change hands. Wade would still owe the money. He would owe it to me. And I would hold the lien on the building, which meant if he ever defaulted, I could foreclose. On his father’s store. All perfectly legal, all mine.
“He’d have to agree to the payoff amount,” Paula said, “but he never has to know who the bank sold the paper to on the back end. From his side, one morning the balance is settled. From your side, you own the whole thing.”
I sat in that office and I thought about Brandy in my kitchen, and Judith’s little satisfied smiles at church, and Wade crying into my hands in April.
“Set it up,” I said.