“People don’t walk in and ask us to protect them from themselves,” Gwen said. “They come in angry that we didn’t stop it. You wrote your own rules. I have told your story, without your name, at two of my trainings.”
“Kurt knew about the scam because I told him.”
“I know. He came in last month and asked what it would take to be put on your account. I told him a court order.”
“And then he asked for one,” I said.
“And then he asked for one.”
The court sent a visitor named Bernard Salas, a retired schoolteacher from Santa Fe in a tweed cap, soft-spoken and thorough. He came three times.
The first time he went through my records. The propane notice from July was in my receipt box, and stapled behind it was the payment, dated the very next morning.
The second time he did not tell me he was coming. He was at my kitchen door at five-forty on a Tuesday morning with his cap in his hands. “I understand you walk to the mailbox,” he said. “Would you mind if I came along?”
We walked down the hill in the dark. I handed him the second mug without a word, and he carried it all the way down and stood by the cottonwood while I said my few words to it. He said nothing. Then he walked me back up.
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On his third visit he sat at my table and said, “Mrs. Hargis, I have interviewed thirty-one people about you. Every person I called asked whether I would like to speak to three others.”
Dena
Dena Stidham came to see me on a Sunday evening near the end of October, in a minivan with the headlights off.
I was on the porch swing with a quilt over my knees. The van came up the lane in the dusk and parked by the barn, and for a long minute nobody got out. Then Dena climbed down with a loaf of banana bread in foil and her eyes already red.
She is forty-four, a dental hygienist, a plain-spoken woman I have never had a cross word with. She sat on the step below me, which she had never done.
“Aunt Lu, I told him he was out of his mind.”
“I believe you did.”
“He won’t hear it. He says it’s only paperwork. He says you’d live like a queen at that place.” She wiped her face with her hand. “He’s lying, Aunt Lu. Not to you. To himself.”
“What is the note, Dena?”
She looked at me a long time. “How did you know there was a note?”
“I know that boy. He hasn’t looked this scared since the tractor.”
She told me. Two hundred twelve thousand dollars on the Edgewood lot, with his signature on the guarantee and their house behind it. Five payments behind. A letter from the lender with a date on it, the thirtieth of November, after which the bank could begin taking things.
Kurt had not slept a full night since June. He had quit going to church because he could not look anyone in the face.
In his mind, she said, the choice was between losing everything he had built and doing one sad, legal, paper thing to an old woman with no children who would never miss the money.
“He thinks he’s saving us,” Dena said. “He doesn’t think it’s stealing, because it’s a court. He says a judge will say yes, so it must be right.”
“And when the judge says no?”
“I don’t know.” She was crying openly now. “I can’t say any of this in that courtroom. He’s my husband. I can’t be the one who stands up.”
“I would never ask you to.”
I put my hand on her hair. I thought about a boy of nine on a tractor, singing off key. I wanted to take that man by the ear. I also wanted to hand him a bowl of beans.
“Go home,” I said. “Tell him I love him. Tell him the answer in March was still no and it will be no on the twelfth. But tell him nobody has to be ruined by the end of that day. Not me, and not him.”
She nodded. She did not go home right away. She stayed on my step until the cold came down, and I let her.