The Reunion Grandma Paid For

The Phone Call

After her set, I sat her in the break room with a cup of coffee and dug the old division order out of the folder she had brought. She keeps everything. There it was, yellowed, with the gas company’s name across the top and an owner relations phone number in Oklahoma City.

I called it on speaker with her sitting right beside me. I knew they wouldn’t talk to me, and they didn’t. A polite young woman named Megan said she could only speak to the owner of record.

So I handed the phone to Grandma.

“This is Pauline Tidwell,” she said, very proper, the way she talks to the doctor. “I’d like to know where you have been sending my checks.”

Megan looked up her owner number. She read back the address, a post office box in town that was not Grandma’s. She said payments had gone out every month since the spring of 2019.

“About how much is a month?” Grandma asked.

“It varies with the price and the volume, ma’am,” Megan said. “But over the last year your net has averaged right around six hundred dollars a month, after the gross production tax.”

Grandma put her hand flat on the break room table. That was the only sign she gave.

“And if I want them to come to me instead,” she said, “what do I do?”

Megan was very clear about it, and I wrote it all down on the back of an appointment card. A signed letter from the owner with the new address. Their direct deposit form, with a voided check from the account she wanted it to go to. A new W-9. They preferred the signature notarized for any change of address, she said, to protect the owner.

“And if somebody else has a power of attorney?” I asked, leaning toward the phone.

“If the owner revokes it, we’d want a copy of the revocation in the file,” Megan said. “Then we only take instructions from Mrs. Tidwell.”

“How long does it take?”

“Once we receive it, it’s usually processed for the next pay cycle. Four to six weeks, typically.”

Grandma thanked her. She said “God bless you, honey,” which she says to everybody who helps her, the pharmacist and the man at the tire shop. Then she hung up and sat looking at the appointment card in my handwriting.

“That’s all?” she said. “One letter?”

“One letter, Grandma. And your name on it.”

She folded the card in half and put it in her purse.

The Bank on Main

On Monday I closed my chair at noon and moved my two afternoon clients to Tuesday. Then I picked Grandma up.

She came out in her navy church dress and her good black shoes, with lipstick on and a manila envelope pressed against her chest like a hymnal.

“You look nice,” I said.

“I’m signing something important,” she said. “You dress for it.”

The bank on Main has been there since 1909. The floors creak. The same woman, Sherry, has been notarizing things at the desk by the window for longer than I have been alive. She stood up when she saw Grandma and came around the desk to hug her.

“Pauline Tidwell. What can I do for you?”

“I need some papers witnessed,” Grandma said. “And I need a voided check for my own account.”

I had typed the letter the night before, on my laptop at the kitchen table. It was short. It gave her owner number, her full name, her new mailing address, which was her own house, and it asked that all future payments go by direct deposit to her checking account at this bank.

Sherry read it through. She glanced at me once, over her glasses, and I could see her working it out. She didn’t ask. She just pulled out her stamp and her logbook.

Grandma signed the letter. Then the direct deposit form. Then the W-9, with her Social Security number written out in her careful schoolteacher hand.

Then I slid the last paper in front of her. It was the revocation of the power of attorney. The lawyer’s office had faxed me the form, and I had filled in the blanks.

Grandma held the pen over it a long time.

“This one says I don’t trust him,” she said.