The Deed I Gave on Mother’s Day

Chandler

The Wednesday before Mother’s Day, I took a half day of annual leave and drove to Chandler.

Our county clerk is in the courthouse there, and across the square there’s a little abstract and title office that has been in the same family since the oil days.

A woman named Donna helped me. She was about my age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had been doing deeds for thirty years.

She did not ask me why I wanted to do it. She only asked who was getting it.

“My daughter,” I said. “Heather Ann Wade. Just her. Not her husband.”

Donna looked at me over her glasses for a second. Then she nodded.

“Gift to a married daughter as her sole and separate property,” she said. “I do one or two of those a month. You’d be surprised.”

She explained it to me plain. In Oklahoma, when somebody gives a house to one spouse as a gift, it stays that spouse’s separate property.

It is not marital property unless she decides to make it so. It belongs to Heather and nobody else.

“It’s a warranty deed,” Donna said. “You sign it in front of a notary. Then you give it to her, and she has to take it. That’s what makes it hers, the handing over. Then you bring it here to the county clerk and it gets recorded.”

“Is there a tax?” I asked. The girl at our bank had told me there was a stamp tax on deeds.

“Not on a gift,” Donna said. “We mark it exempt. Recording is eighteen dollars for the first page and a couple of dollars for each one after. You’ll want your tax man to file a gift form with your federal return next spring, but nobody pays tax on a house this size.”

She charged me a hundred and fifty dollars to draw it up.

I wrote the check and sat in my Jeep in front of the courthouse for ten minutes before I could make myself turn the key.

Friday and Saturday

On Friday I signed it at our bank in town. A young woman named Kayla, who I remembered from Bella’s age, stamped it with her notary seal and said, “This is a nice thing you’re doing, Mrs. Engel.”

She thought it was a simple gift. In a way, it was.

I folded it in thirds and put it in an envelope in my purse. I did not tell anybody. Not Kim, not my sister in Ada, nobody.

Saturday I drove out to the cemetery behind the Methodist church with a bunch of carnations from the grocery store.

I put them on Mother’s grave and on Dale’s beside hers, and I sat on the little concrete bench there a long while.

“I’m giving away your house, Mama,” I said out loud. There was nobody around but a meadowlark on the fence. “I think you’d like who I’m giving it to.”

I cried some. That is all right. I had been holding a lot of suppers in, and some of them came out on that bench.