The Notary at Mother’s Birthday Supper
That did not make the paper all right. It is important to me that you know I never thought it made the paper all right.
But it made him a person again, which was inconvenient.
“You brought a stranger to my birthday,” Mom said, “so I’d be too polite to read it.”
His eyes filled. A forty-seven-year-old man.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I did. That’s exactly what I did.”
“And you’d have let your sisters find out at the funeral.”
“I told myself I’d have it put back by then.” He shook his head. “No. I’d have let them. I did it, Mom. Nobody talked me into it. Dana told me not to.”
That was the whole confession. He did not dress it up. I will give him that until the day I die.
Mom reached over and picked up the quitclaim deed. She folded it in half, and in half again, and she put it in the pocket of her cardigan, the way you would take a sharp thing away from a child without making a fuss.
“Your daddy borrowed nine thousand dollars from his brother Leonard in 1986,” she said. “Did you know that? Corn was a dollar forty and the bank in Oakland was calling notes all over the county. He sat in the pickup in Leonard’s yard for forty-five minutes before he could make himself go knock. He told me it was the hardest thing he ever did, and he’d been to Vietnam.”
She looked at her son.
“He knocked, though.”
The legal pad
She got up again. This time she went to the telephone desk in the corner and came back with a yellow legal pad and her own pen, a black one.
She sat down. She put her glasses on.
“Hailey,” she said, “your seventy dollars is paid.”
“Seventy-five, ma’am.”
“Seventy-five. And you drove forty minutes and you’ve only had one bite of cake. If I wrote out a different paper tonight, in my own hand, and the people signing it understood it and wanted to, would you notarize that one instead?”
Hailey sat up straighter. “If you write it yourself, and I see everybody’s license, and everybody signing tells me they understand it and they’re willing, then yes, ma’am. I can acknowledge signatures on that. I can’t help you word it.”
“I don’t need help wording it.”
She did not. She wrote for about ten minutes, and nobody talked. Jodi got up and poured coffee all around. Dana cried without any sound, and Jodi, who is the kindest of us, put a hand on the back of her neck in passing.
When Mom was done she turned the pad around and read it to us herself.
It was a promissory note. It said that she, Marian L. Novak, was lending her son Kyle R. Novak twenty-four thousand dollars out of her own savings. It said what the money was for, in a list: the three months owed on his house, and the back payments on the skid steer, so that he kept a roof and kept the machine he earned with. It said he would pay her four hundred dollars on the first of every month, beginning the first of November, at two percent, until it was paid.
“Two percent because a loan with no interest is a gift,” she said, “and I am not giving it. I’m lending it.”
It said he would sell the bass boat and the side-by-side before Thanksgiving and put every dollar toward the credit cards, and show her the receipts.
“That’s the other half of your forty-eight,” she said. “You’ll have to dig that out yourself. I’m not rich, Kyle. That twenty-four is most of what your daddy’s insurance left me that isn’t spoken for.”
And it said one more thing, at the bottom, which she read more slowly than the rest.
It said that if she died before the note was paid, whatever he still owed would come out of his third of the place and go to his sisters, in equal parts.
“So nobody at this table is paying for this but the one who borrowed it,” she said. “That’s as fair as I know how to make it.”
She drew three lines under her writing. Then two more beneath those.
“Borrower. Lender. And two witnesses.” She laid the pen down. “I’d like the witnesses to be your sisters.”