The Deed I Set Beside His Plate

The Drive Home

Tom drove. I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the soybeans go by on Highway 75, rows and rows of them, green and heavy in the heat.

“You could have said something,” Tom said, not unkind.

“And then what?”

He thought about it. Tom is a careful man. He drives a feed truck for the co-op and he has never once in twenty-two years of marriage made a decision faster than it needed to be made.

“Then your mother picks him,” he said. “In front of you. And you lose Sunday dinners.”

“That’s what I think too.”

“So what’s the plan?”

I did not have one yet. What I had was a list of things I knew, and I went through them in my head the whole twenty minutes home.

My mother had signed the quitclaim of her own free will. Nobody held her hand to the pen. She had walked into the bank with Ron, signed it in front of Kathy Moser, who notarized it, and Ron had taken it to the Register of Deeds at the courthouse the same afternoon.

It was legal. It was ugly and it was foolish, but it was legal. There was nothing for the sheriff. There was no crime in a grown woman giving away her own house.

And my mother would never in this life sue a man she loved. I could hire every lawyer in Topeka and she would sit on the other side of the courtroom from me, holding his hand.

The house was worth about $180,000. Five acres, the old barn, the machine shed Dad built, the garden spot where Mom still put up forty quarts of tomatoes every August. It was everything she had besides her school pension and her Social Security.

If Ron died first, it went to whoever Ron said. If Ron left her, she could be put out of her own kitchen.

“He’s got kids?” Tom asked.

“A son in Wichita. They don’t talk.”

Tom nodded slowly. “Then the son gets your mother’s house.”

We pulled into our driveway and sat there with the engine running and the air on.

“Her birthday’s in October,” I said.

“Seventy,” Tom said.

“Seventy,” I said. And I started to think.