The Guardianship Papers on My Table

What the Paper Said About Me

Kurt said I forgot to pay my bills. He attached a past due notice from the propane company, dated July, with a yellow sticky note in his handwriting that read Found on kitchen table, August.

He said I had been seen walking the county road before sunrise, alone, carrying a light, and heard talking to myself. He said that in April I had been cheated out of eight hundred and forty dollars by a telephone scammer. He said a nurse at the clinic in Moriarty had written in my chart that I was confused and repeated myself.

Then he asked for what he wanted. He asked the court to name him my guardian and conservator, so he could decide where I lived and what became of everything I owned. He asked for permission to sell my adobe house and my nineteen acres west of Willard, and to place me in a memory care home in Albuquerque called Sandia Gardens.

He asked for my certificate of deposit at Valley State Bank, thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars, and my checking account, and my Social Security.

Stapled to the back was a page from a real estate woman in Moriarty named Trish Honeycutt. She called it a price opinion. She put my house at two hundred sixty-five thousand dollars.

That page made me angrier than all the rest. Somebody had walked through my kitchen and priced it, and nobody had thought to ask me one question first.

I am eighty years old. I cooked for the Willard school for thirty-one years. My husband, Gus, has been in the Willard cemetery eleven years, and in all that time I have balanced my own checkbook in pencil on the last day of every month and never once been short.

I folded the papers along their creases and set them beside the salt.

“Mrs. Hargis,” Ruben said quietly, “I want you to know I didn’t pick this one.”

“I know you didn’t, honey. Take a tortilla for the road.”

He took two. At the door he put his hat on and then took it right back off. “My mom is going to want to know how you’re doing.”

“Tell her I’m fine.”

The Lot in Moriarty

I did not sit down and cry, though I thought about it. I washed the two bowls. Then I got in my truck, a 1996 Chevy that Gus bought new, and drove the thirty miles to Moriarty, because I wanted to see Kurt’s face and I did not want him to be able to hang up on mine.

Kurt is Gus’s brother’s boy. His father left for Phoenix when Kurt was eight, so from that summer on he lived with us from the day school let out until the week it started. Gus put him on the tractor at nine. I taught him to make biscochitos. He was a quiet, serious boy who said grace without being asked.

He is forty-six now. He owns Stidham Trailer and Hitch, with a big lot by the interstate in Moriarty and a second one in Edgewood, and he sells stock trailers to every rancher and 4-H family in the valley. People like him, and I have always been proud of that.

He was out by the fence talking to a man in a feed cap about an eleven thousand dollar gooseneck when I pulled in. He saw my truck and I watched the color leave him. He shook the man’s hand and walked over to my window with his shoulders up around his ears.

“Aunt Lu. You shouldn’t have driven all this way.”

“It’s thirty miles. I drive to Albuquerque for the eye doctor.”

“I was going to come see you. After you’d had a chance to read it.”

“I read it. Ruben Trujillo ate two bowls of beans while I did.”

“It’s for your own good,” he said. “You had that fever in August. You called me Gus, Aunt Lu. You looked right at me and said, Gus, did you shut the gate. And the thing in April with the gift cards. I’m scared for you out there alone.”

All of that was true, and I want to say so, because I have never cared for a story where the teller is the only one who is right.

In August I had a bladder infection and a fever of a hundred and two, and I did call him Gus. I sat in a paper gown at the clinic and could not have told you the year. Nobody wrote down that four days of antibiotics had me arguing about the price of hay.

“Kurt,” I said, “did you ever once ask me?”

“Ask you what?”

“Whether I was scared. Whether I needed help. Whether I wanted to leave my own house.”

He looked at his boots. A pickup went by on the highway and the wind flattened his shirt against his back.

“You’d have said no,” he said.

“I would have. That is how you ask a person a question.”

I did not raise my voice. The man in the feed cap was still thirty feet away pretending to read a tag on a hitch, and I will not hand anybody the gift of a scene. I rolled up my window and drove home, and I knew by Estancia that this was not about the fever.