The Guardianship Papers on My Table

The Guest Book

On the morning of the twelfth, Eloy drove me to Estancia in his old Ford because he said my truck was a danger on the highway. I wore the navy dress I wore to Gus’s funeral and my good wool coat. In my purse I had Dr. Linebarger’s letter, Gwen’s note, and nothing else.

We came in on Highway 41 at half past eight. The Torrance County courthouse is a square brick building with a flagpole and a lawn that has been brown since the nineteen seventies. I had expected the lot to be empty.

It was not. Pickups lined both sides of the street and filled the church lot across the road, and a man from the volunteer fire department was waving cars into the grass. I sat in Eloy’s truck with my purse in my lap and could not make my hand open the door.

“Eloy. What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing.” He set his hat on the dash. “Lonnie Peck put up a card.”

I learned the rest later. Lonnie had pinned a three by five card beside Trish Honeycutt’s, in his own square printing.

Luella Hargis hearing, Thursday the 12th, 9 a.m., Torrance County Courthouse, Estancia. Bring yourself.

That was all. By the first of November there were forty cards, at the post office and the church and every feed store between Mountainair and Moriarty. Nobody had to ask anybody.

The hallway outside the courtroom was shoulder to shoulder. Bernie Ulibarri had set up a folding table with crockpots and a pan of biscochitos, because she said it was a funeral rule, you bring food. The bailiff, a big gentle deputy named Rey, was holding one cookie like evidence.

By the courtroom door, on a bench, sat a green cloth guest book with a pen on a string, the kind they leave out at a funeral home. Eloy’s granddaughter had bought it at the card store, and Eloy had printed Luella Hargis on the cover himself. The first page was full. So was the second.

“At a funeral you sign the book so the family knows who came,” Eloy said behind me. “We figured you ought to know.”

“Eloy, I am not dead.”

“No, ma’am.” He put his hat back on. “We’re not burying you. We’re counting you.”

I laid my hand on the book. I did not trust myself to say anything.

Then the courtroom door opened and Anita came out in a black suit. She took one look at the hall and said very softly, “Oh, good.”

Through the door I could see Kurt at the petitioner’s table in his gray church jacket, beside a lawyer from Albuquerque with silver hair and a leather folder. Kurt had not turned around.