The Money My Father Left Me

“Forty thousand dollars,” I said. “Against a house that has not needed a thing done to it since Dad put the roof on himself. I have got the papers. I have got where every dollar went. And you are lucky, you are so lucky, that I love this family enough to want to fix this in an office instead of in front of Wade’s mother.”

Wade had come up beside me by then, quiet, one hand light on my shoulder, and I felt the whole room take its cue from him and pretend very hard to be interested in the coffee and the cake. My uncle got very busy with a napkin. Wade’s mother, Nadine, God love her, stood up and started asking the auxiliary ladies about the recipe for the potatoes in a loud clear voice, giving us all a little bit of cover, and I have loved that woman ever since.

My mother sat down. She just sank into the chair like her legs had quit. Chloe came halfway across the room and then stopped, like she could not decide which of us she was walking toward, and in the end she was not walking toward either of us. She was just standing in the middle of my engagement supper with nowhere left to stand.

Wade leaned down close to my ear, the way my mother had an hour before, but his voice was the opposite of hers. “You okay, Dana?”

“No,” I said. And then, “Yes.” And both were true.

Monday

We did sit down in Ellis Warner’s office that Monday, all of us, and I will not pretend it was clean, because it was not. It was one of the hardest rooms I have ever sat in.

Ellis is a heavyset man in his sixties with reading glasses he keeps pushing up his nose, and he laid the papers out on his conference table the same careful way I had laid them out on my kitchen table two days before. He did not raise his voice one time. He did not have to. He just asked my mother, gently, to walk him through the roof repairs that the forty-thousand-dollar loan had paid for, and my mother could not, because there had never been any roof repairs, and everybody in that room knew it, and the not-being-able-to was louder than any yelling would have been.

Here is what I learned in that office. Because my signature had been obtained on the loan under false pretenses, because my mother had told me I was signing for one thing when I was signing for another, I had grounds. Real grounds. The bank had a problem, because their loan was partly built on a fraudulent representation. My mother had a bigger problem, because forging the purpose of a document to get a person’s signature is not a small thing, and using it to strip equity out of a house that a will had promised to that same person is a worse thing.

Ellis looked at me over his glasses and he asked me the question that everything came down to. “Dana, what do you want out of this? You can push this all the way. You would likely win. It could go hard for your mother. Or we can find another road. It is your call, and only yours.”

And I sat there and I thought about my father, and the pole barn, and the three-eighths wrench, and the man who would have been so quietly, terribly ashamed of what his house had been used for.