The Guardianship Papers on My Table

The Card on the Bulletin Board

I told nobody for four days, and I would be telling nobody still if Lonnie Peck had not gone looking for a bag of calf starter.

Lonnie owns Valley Feed and Supply in Estancia. By the door he keeps a corkboard where people pin up hay for sale, kittens, farrier cards, and funerals. On Saturday morning he found a new card in the middle of it, with a color photograph of a kitchen.

It was a card from Trish Honeycutt of Mountain Realty. Coming Soon, it said. Adobe charmer on nineteen acres near Willard, vigas, working windmill, motivated seller, court approval pending.

The picture was my kitchen. My blue tile. Gus’s cast iron skillet on its nail. The rooster clock he won at the county fair in 1974. Lonnie told me later that it had been taken on a Wednesday in September, while I was quilting at the senior center, with a key Kurt had made at the hardware store.

Lonnie has sold me bean seed for forty years. He stood reading the words court approval pending until they quit being English, and then he drove to Willard to find Eloy Baca.

Eloy is eighty-nine and lives on the next place over. He has farmed my twelve acres of bean ground on shares since Gus died, and he writes down every sack in a green ledger in a hand like a railroad timetable.

Every January we compare his books to mine down to the penny. We have never been off, and we are both a little vain about it.

Nobody came to my door that day. By supper, I learned later, the news had been through the Willard prayer chain, the senior center, and a table of ranchers at the cafe. It went fastest through the retired lunch ladies. Bernie Ulibarri, who worked the dish line beside me for nineteen years, had a cousin in Trish’s office.

On Sunday after church Bernie drove out with a foil pan of enchiladas and sat in my kitchen three hours.

“Luella Hargis, you are a stubborn old mule. Nobody is asking you to beg. We’re only asking you to stand still.”

I did not understand what she meant until the twelfth.

Twenty-Nine Out of Thirty

Dr. Howard Linebarger has been my doctor thirty-one years. He is seventy-one and keeps two days at the clinic in Estancia because he says nobody else will tell the ranchers to quit smoking.

I went to see him the first week of October with the papers in my purse. He read the nurse’s note from August with his glasses down his nose and laid it face down on his desk.

“Luella, you had a urinary infection and a fever of a hundred and two. A fever like that can scramble anybody, young or old, for a few days. We call it delirium. It leaves when the infection leaves, and yours left in four. I have the labs right here.”

“So I wasn’t losing my mind.”

“You were running a fever. They are not the same thing.” He tapped his pen on the blotter. “Want me to give you the test?”

It is a one-page test. He had me draw a clock with the hands at ten past eleven. He named five words, face, velvet, church, daisy, red, and talked to me about my garden for five minutes before he asked for them back. I counted backward from a hundred by sevens faster than he could himself.

“Twenty-nine out of thirty,” he said.

“Which one did I miss?”

“Velvet.”

“Well, I never liked velvet.”

He laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses. Then he wrote me a letter in his own hand and said he would sit in the courtroom if the judge asked.

That same week I walked into Valley State Bank and asked for the manager. Gwen Medlin has been there twenty-six years. She took me into her office and shut the door.

“Luella, I can’t talk about your account with anybody else, and I haven’t. But I want to give you something.”

She slid a printed note across the desk. It was from my file, dated the Monday after the scam.

It said I had come in two days after the telephone call and told her all of it. That I had said, I have been a fool and I do not intend to be one twice. That I had asked her to hold any withdrawal over five hundred dollars and call me first, and then call Eloy Baca as a second person.